DON T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE!
The subprime lending and foreclosure crisis has hit Lorain and Northeast Ohio hard. Lorain had a third of all the home foreclosures filed last year in Lorain County, even though the city has less than one quarter of the county s households, according to figures from the county clerk of courts office. As usual, politicians are falling all over themselves trying to fix the problem. Before deciding how or even whether to fix the problem, it helps to understand its cause. The prob
Glass house alert: Nortel Garth Turner gloating over Lukiwski s 17-year-old blast
Many political partisans spent this evening puffing up another Conservative-bashing non-scandal, trying to bring down Saskatchewan MP Tom Lukiwski for a drunken faggot blast caught on video tape 17 years ago. Among those attempting to make political hay over these intemperate, and sorely regretted, long-lost words of Lukiwski is none other than Parliament s fool on the hill, Liberal MP Garth Turner. Perhaps Mr. Turner forgot that he lives in a glass house. Time to pick up the shards, Gart
How Not To Save Housing
Robert J. Samuelson - How Not To Save Housing - washingtonpost.com About 50 million homeowners have mortgages. Who wouldn’t like the government to cut their monthly payments by 20 or 30 percent? But Frank’s plan reserves that privilege for an estimated 1 million to 2 million homeowners who are the weakest and most careless borrowers. With the FHA now authorized to lend up to $729,750 in high-cost areas, some beneficiaries could be fairly wealthy. By contrast, people who made larger down payment
Most think the Fed follows market expectations. Count me in that group as well. However, this creates what would appear at first glance to be a major paradox: If the Fed is simply following market expectations, can the Fed be to blame for the consequences? More pointedly, why isn’t the market to blame if the Fed is simply following market expectations? This is a very interesting theoretical question. While it’s true the Fed typically only does what is expected, those expectations become distort