This weekend, the New York Times featured an unusual story on housing. Its argument goes like this: The government has done a lot to ensure that home prices do not slide too precipitously. But houses are still too expensive — and if the government were to pull its interventions, More…
Felix Salmon links to a post by Barbara Kiviat asking: If the government wants to build more incentives for affordable rentals, and more and more people will need to live in rentals since the housing bust, who is going to rent out all those houses?
Another principle most participants in the “Future of Housing Finance” Treasury Department conference agreed on: The country needs more, better rental housing. But what kind of rental housing? In Newsweek, Alyssa Katz writes about a federal voucher program for low-income families. The families can use the vouchers in any More…
For reforming housing finance, there remain more questions than answers — a fact highlighted at yesterday’s “Future of Housing Finance” conference at the Treasury Department. But policymakers in Washington seem to agree on one thing: There will be no more Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at least not in More…
Yesterday, the Treasury Department held a conference on the “Future of Housing Finance.” The summit — drawing together major governmental, housing-industry research and private-industry figures — came as the Obama administration develops a plan to overhaul Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that have required a $150 More…
Today, I’ll be covering a Treasury Department conference on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that provide liquidity to the mortgage market and have required $150 billion in a taxpayer bailout so far.
Reform will prove difficult and will happen slowly because Fannie and More…
“Buy new with $1,000 down,” the advertisement says, the words resting atop a trim green clapboard house offset by a bright blue sky. “The time has come. Stop wasting rent check after rent check and start building equity in your own home. And with only $1,000 down, affordable monthly payments More…
Despite Republican objections, congressional Democrats did not include reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or of the broader mortgage market in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill — now law. The administration has promised comprehensive reform but thus far has not named any objectives, costs More…
This morning, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, released his latest quarterly report on the state of the Obama administration’s signature effort to calm the financial markets — from banking to credit to housing. In it, he lambastes the Home Affordable More…
Today, Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP — in layman’s terms, the government’s watchdog over the program to stabilize the banking sector and housing market — released a quarterly report on how things are going. TARP programs did well to stabilize More…
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