All Posts Tagged With: "housing crisis"

False Foreclosures and the Free Market

Once the government effectively nationalized these institutions allegedly to make them solvent, any notion of real customer service disappeared.

22Dec2010 | William L. Anderson | 4 comments | Continued

The Canard of “Underutilized Resources”

Despite the seductive logic of the Keynesian physicians, printing money is patent-medicine quackery that stands to do the patient more harm than good.

18Nov2010 | Tyler Watts | 6 comments | Continued

Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis and The Housing Boom and Bust

These two books are must-reads for anyone wanting to have a working understanding of the economic and financial crisis.  They complement each other and together form a civics lesson for an informed electorate. Economists are prone to write turgid prose and employ a jargon-filled style. Not these two gems. Each author is a deservedly well-regarded [...]

22Sep2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Now This Is News

From the Wall Street Journal (subscription site): Barney Frank has been all over the airwaves this week with a clear and—we never thought we’d say this—perfectly sound message about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “They should be abolished.” Considering that Frank has been one of the principal backers and beneficiaries of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises, [...]

19Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | Continued

The Government Turns on Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs took a beating during the spring.  The SEC and a Senate committee were investigating whether it behaved improperly when it participated in a bet against the shaky mortgages fueling the housing boom and allegedly failed to disclose this to buyers of its “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.” The allegation of wrongdoing is an empirical [...]

29Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Who Watches Our Guardians?

Predictably, the leading inquisitors into the causes of the financial turmoil are themselves among the most culpable: Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. AIG got into trouble because it in effect wrote insurance policies (credit default swaps) against the failure of securities based on mortgages, many of which were waiting to blow up when the housing bubble burst. Who created the housing bubble?

21May2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Recurring Crisis

Recently the governor of the Bank of England announced that the “nice” times had come to an end. (In the Bank’s lexicon, NICE = “Non-Inflationary Constant Expansion”). This news will not come as any shock to the many Americans who have had their homes repossessed recently, but it does appear to have startled many of [...]

1Jul2008 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis?

The current housing and financial crisis has many people blaming “greed and market forces” for unleashing a panoply of evils on the unsuspecting middle class. This has led to many bad proposals to solve the crisis, such as the April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Inflation Solution to the Housing Mess” by John Makin, [...]

1Jul2008 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

Government Intervention Is Needed to Solve the Housing Crisis?

In his March 18, 2008, column in the New York Times, David Brooks addresses the ongoing problems in the housing industry and concludes that “In normal times, the free market works well. But in a crisis like this one, few are willing to sit back and let the market find its own equilibrium.” Instead, Brooks [...]

1May2008 | Steven Horwitz | 3 comments | Continued

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