Dear friends:
I hope you had a peaceful, happy Thanksgiving.
Most of the news in the last couple of weeks has been about the foreclosure crisis and efforts to reform the mortgage market. The Washington Post had an article [1] (free registration required) about the bill that Linda Sanchez and I introduced to allow modification of home mortgages by bankruptcy courts, which was syndicated in several other newspapers [2]. The bill won editorial support from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [3], The Nation [4], and in a column [5] by David Sirota that appeared in a few newspapers.
[6]An editoral [7] in the New York Times called the Bush Administration plan announced last week "too little, too late and too voluntary," and said that if "the industry drags its feet," the Bush Administration should support "the tougher approaches being called for on Capitol Hill," including "allow[ing] troubled borrowers to restructure their mortgages under bankruptcy court protection."
Elizabeth Warren, a prominent Harvard law professor, was harsher in a blog at TPMCafe [8]. Professor Warren said the Bush Administration mortgage proposal "is the bank lobby's dream," and was designed to "kill off the bankruptcy proposal to deal with home mortgages." The bankruptcy legislation, she wrote, "will help move toward a more stable (and more realistic) housing market faster."
I talked with NPR [9] and with a regional cable news network [10] for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut about the Bush Administration's plan, and I said much the same thing: the Bush Administration plan gives too few people too little relief.
The issue of foreclosures and abusive practices in mortgage lending will be with us months, maybe longer.
There were hints in the last couple of weeks of some fights ahead between Congress and the Bush Administration. I wrote a guest editoral [11] about contempt of congress in The Politico, one of the Washington political trade rags, which won some notice in an article [12] at DailyKos.The Bush Administration's executive order that changes how federal agencies decide rules also may come up again [13] in the next couple of weeks, when the House and the Senate consider an omnibus appropriations bill. The Bush Administration wants to restore pre-Watergate executive power, but the executive order is more like a pre-Runnymede version of executive power.
Again, I hope your holidays are peaceful and happy. I have blessings great and small to be thankful for, including not getting food poisoning [14].
Brad
Links:
[1] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/19/AR2007111901327.html?hpid=sec-business&id=preview
[2] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/23/BU1OTFUSQ.DTL&id=preview
[3] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/11/25/loansed_1126.html&id=preview
[4] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/editors&id=preview
[5] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_7592805&id=preview
[6] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/opinion/09sun1.html&id=preview
[7] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/opinion/09sun1.html&id=preview
[8] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/warrenreports/2007/dec/07/the_sandbag_plan&id=preview
[9] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16981168&id=preview
[10] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.rnntv.com/global/video/popup/pop_player.asp?clipid1=1994847&at1=News&vt1=v&h1=Bush%27s+Mortgage+Meltdown+Solution&d1=354833&redirUrl=www.rnntv.com&activePane=info&LaunchPageAdTag=homepage&playerVersion=9&hostPageUrl=http%3A//www.rnntv.com/global/video/popup/pop_playerLaunch.asp%3Fclipid1%3D1994847%26at1%3DNews%26vt1%3Dv%26h1%3DBush%2527s+Mortgage+Meltdown+Solution%26d1%3D354833%26redirUrl%3Dwww.rnntv.com%26activePane%3Dinfo%26LaunchPageAdTag%3Dhomepage&rnd=2778308&id=preview
[11] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7179.html&id=preview
[12] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/5/103212/477&id=preview
[13] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a_7HlSKN7E0U&refer=us&id=preview
[14] http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=owg9lhcab.0.0.yfcnmccab.0&ts=S0302&p=http://www.roxboro-courier.com/newsnowstories/ts120807-2.htm&id=preview