Credit enhancement provided by private capital, in the form of mortgage insurance, is a time-tested and effective execution, and should be part of any effort to reform the housing markets.
Goldman Sachs is raising money for a new fund that will buy home-loan bonds and, it hopes, benefit from an improving real-estate market. This is insane.
Watching Louis Davidson's eviction it became clear to me that nobody in the beltway mansion that Fannie calls home had any sort of compassion for what a homeowner halfway across the country was going through.
For more than a decade, banks have encouraged all retailers to have their customers sign for their debit card purchases instead of entering a PIN. The signature system is far more prone to fraud.
The federal government could prohibit contracts to corporations that use a CPA firm that fails to follow generally accepted accounting principles or lacks independence from management.
There is no convincing evidence that eliminating the mortgage interest deduction now would free up capital for more productive investment. Nor would it necessarily achieve the goal of "fairness."
Money market mutual fund shares price at a dollar on a daily basis because the underlying assets are required to meet very stringent credit quality, liquidity and maturity requirements.
