Government bailouts, the gift that keeps on giving. Mortgage giant Fannie Mae said Wednesday that it lost money in the fourth quarter and is asking the federal government for nearly $4.6 billion in aid to cover its deficit. Washington, D.C.-based Fannie said it lost roughly $2.4 billion in the October-December quarter, stung by declining home prices. ... MORE
Showing posts with label housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label housing. Show all posts
Fannie Mae Needs Another $4.6Billion From Taxpayers
Government bailouts, the gift that keeps on giving. Mortgage giant Fannie Mae said Wednesday that it lost money in the fourth quarter and is asking the federal government for nearly $4.6 billion in aid to cover its deficit. Washington, D.C.-based Fannie said it lost roughly $2.4 billion in the October-December quarter, stung by declining home prices. ... MOREJohn Merline: Dependency Index Surges Under Obama
Up a whopping 23 percent to 67 million citizens. The American public's dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative think tank's annual Index of ... MORESteven Greenhut: Property Rights Win In The Golden State
California's redevelopment scam dead at last. The California Redevelopment Association’s Web site is still up and running and still features job postings for redevelopment jobs, although the site does report that the association’s annual convention and expo has been cancelled. It’s just a matter of time before the news reaches the CRA web-master ... MOREJohn Merline: Obama Doing Good Job Creating Dependents
Create a dependent and you have a constituant. If the Republican primaries are any indication, one big debate in the upcoming election will be whether President Obama is pushing the country into becoming a European-style welfare culture. Mitt Romney, for example, argues that "over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based ... MOREBinyamin Appelbaum: Fed Sees Rates Staying Near Zero
Bernanke favors keeping lid on boiling pressure cooker. The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it intended to hold short-term interest rates near zero “at least through late 2014,” extending its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis by at least another 18 months. The decision means that the Fed does not expect the ... MORE
Steven Greenhut: Jerry Brown's Failed Vision
Fires cannot be extinguished with more flames. Years ago, after starting to report and editorialize on news events in an old factory city in Ohio, I was quickly dubbed a “negative” for pointing out the disastrous government spending, housing, and tax policies embraced by city leaders—policies that were keeping a nice place wretched. Anyone who made ... MORE
Investors Business Daily: Fed Looks To Print More Money
More Fed meddling won't help. The media have busied themselves with touting the big economic rebound they see brewing in the U.S. We hope they're right. But if they are, why is the Federal Reserve getting ready to print even more money? The media argument goes like this: After years of struggling, the economy is finally churning out jobs. Last month ... MOREPeter Ferrara: Bloomberg Covers For Government Folly
Media propagandists advance the Democratic Party line. On December 21, Bloomberg News breathlessly reported, "The leading Republican candidates for president have embraced an explanation of the financial crisis that has been rejected by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, many economists and even three of the four ... MORE50 Facts About The U.S. Economy That Will Shock You
The situation is bad -- very bad. “Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don’t make dramatic changes immediately,” writes The Economic Collapse (TEC). ... MOREJonah Goldberg: Why We Need Not Envy China
Up to 40 million Chinese people still live in caves. That's more than the populations of Texas and Illinois, combined. In fairness, a fraction of these caves are apparently pretty nice, complete with electricity and well-compacted dirt floors. But that's grading on a curve because, well, they're still caves. Meanwhile, 21 million Chinese live below what the Communist ... MOREHousing Crisis Caused By Government, Not Bankers
Smoking-gun document ties policy to housing crisis. President Obama says the Occupy Wall Street protests show a "broad-based frustration" among Americans with the financial sector, which continues to kick against regulatory reforms three years after the financial crisis. "You're seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack ... MORERandazzo & Stansel: The Upper-Class Entitlement
It's time to end the mortgage interest deduction. The federal income tax code is full of complicated deductions, credits, and loopholes, which together exempted $1.2 trillion from taxation in 2009. The single largest benefit, amounting to around 35 percent of the total, is the mortgage interest deduction. This longstanding incentive, which allows individual ... MOREDestroying Value Is What Government Does Best
by Sheldon Richman. In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste — the destruction of value — is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior ... MOREThomas Sowell: Politics Vs Economics
The focus is on the next election, not the next generation. They say "all politics is local." But economic decisions impact the whole economy and reverberate internationally. That is why politicians' meddling with the economy creates so many disasters. The time horizon of politics seldom reaches beyond the next election. But, in economics, when an oil ... MORE
VIDEO: Thomas Sowell - Affordable Housing Fallacies
Professor Sowell explains the real world effects of affordable housing schemes.
David Brooks: The Biggest Scandal Since Watergate
Most political scandals involve people who are not really enmeshed in the Washington establishment — people like Representative Anthony Weiner or Representative William Jefferson. Most scandals involve spectacularly bad behavior — like posting pictures of your private parts on the Web or hiding $90,000 in cash in your freezer. But the most devastating scandal in recent ... MOREAffordable Housing Means Your House Is Worth Less
by Anthony Randazzo. Martin Luther King famously once proclaimed, “I have a dream, that one day my children would not be judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character, and that they would have a right to a home at an affordable price.” Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. But an unusual coalition of financial institutions and community housing advocates ... MOREThomas Sowell: Different Decisions
Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between government decisions and private decisions. Under the headline "Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts," USA Today reported that banks were selling the homes they foreclosed on, at discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and Ohio. Banks in general try to get rid of the homes they ... MORE
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