So I ask now what? What’s the home inspectors take on this?
They said they were going to do this years ago. Look at it like this, they (the government) will make getting loans for people (of lesser means) easier and they will most likely require a home inspection. However the inspector may have to be trained their way but maybe not. If it is a requirement then the pay will be two months out. The buyer will not have the money to pay you.
The downside, it is a government take over which makes the government that much bigger. Which is what McCain does not want so it may never come about anyway.
The big Downside if the inspection is required then a contractor will hire you as a sub to do the inspection at a pre- negotiated fee. The contractor will most likely be a class 8a small business owner (minority) and he will live 595 miles away from you in a big house on a hill.
In other words it is possiable for all home to require an inspection if financed but everyone and there brother will become a inspector and you will not be able to make a living.
Just my opinion only.
I’m against government bailout on principle because the free market is more efficient but one has to wonder if a free market really exists with all the previous government inference and manipulation of rules, regulations and mandates.
The big unknown is how muck of the $5.3 Trillion in mortgages these two entities hold or guarantee will ultimately the responsibility of the taxpayer.
We have entered the great unknown.
Maybe the Saudi Oil Cartels will take over.
George has another notch in his belt and needs another boot in his butt.
imo
OMG We agree! :roll:
I know.
I hope it doesn’t become habit forming:mrgreen:
Tax Gougers Going After Gas Gougers
Charge $5 a gallon for gas and you will be arrested.
Charge Freddie and Fannie’s bad debt to the taxpayer and you will be applauded.
Welcome to The Republican Wonderland
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HOUSTON - From Florida to Tennessee, and all the way up to Connecticut, people far from Hurricane Ike’s destruction nonetheless felt one of its tell-tale aftershocks: gasoline prices that surged overnight — to nearly $5 a gallon in some places.
Fears of supply shortages, and actual fuel-production disruptions, resulting from Ike’s lashing of vital energy infrastructure led to pump price disparities of as much as $1 a gallon in some states, and even on some blocks.
Late Saturday the U.S. Minerals Management Service said there were two confirmed reports of drilling rigs adrift in the central Gulf of Mexico.
Compounding the jitters and higher costs for gasoline retailers was the fact that some big refineries along the Gulf Coast had been shut for nearly two weeks following Hurricane Gustav. Power outages caused by Ike threatened to keep millions of gallons of gasoline output idled for at least several days.
The price of regular gasoline soared as high as $4.99 a gallon in Knoxville, Tenn. on Saturday, up from $3.66 a day earlier.
In Florida, the attorney general’s office reported prices as high as $5.50 a gallon in Tallahassee and said it had received 186 gouging complaints.
Gov. Charles Crist said on Friday that $5 a gallon “can only be described as unconscionable” and added: “Raising rates to exorbitant levels like this only causes unnecessary panic and fear. This type of behavior will not be tolerated.”
Excerpt: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080914/…mNb5Sdo_t34T0D
A different perspective on “Price Gouging”
Written shortly after Katrina.
Don’t try to tell me people understand basic economics.
**In praise of price gouging **](http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2005/09/07/in_praise_of_price_gouging)
by John Stossel
Concludes with this:
If he charges enough to justify his venture, he’s likely to be condemned morally or legally by the very people he’s trying to help. But they just don’t understand basic economics.
Force prices down, and you keep suppliers out. Let the market work, suppliers come – and competition brings prices as low as the challenges of the disaster allow. Goods that were in short supply become available, even to the poor.
It’s the price “gougers” who bring the water, ship the gasoline, fix the roof, and rebuild the cities. The price “gougers” save lives
Republicans preached about smaller government and free markets, so where is it?
Yep, why do you think so many conservatives are P.O.ed?
The Dems have never had any intention that didn’t include expanding the reach and size of government.
Anyone up for a revolution?
**Hmmm, Looks like McCain and Bush were on the case.
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae**
By Stephen Labaton
September 11, 2003
**The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. **
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.
**The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios. **
The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.
”There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,” Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.
And it is more than a little disturbing that there was no mention of John McCain’s words before congress in 2006:Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005
The United States Senate
May 25, 2006
Sen. John McCain [R-AZ]: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.
The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.
For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.
I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.
I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.
More about why Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae ended up the way they did.
They had a ton of Democratic party “help”.
Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Regulation: As the financial crisis spreads, denials on Capitol Hill grow more shrill. Blame an aloof President Bush, greedy Wall Street, risky capitalism — anybody but those in Congress who wrote the banking rules.
Read More: Election 2008 | Iraq
Such denials won’t hold against the angry facts banging on their doors. The only question is whether the guilty party can keep up the barricade until Election Day.
A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. “No,” she snapped at reporters who dared ask.
Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.
“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.
**Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful **of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.
They were the ones who screamed — “REDLINING!” — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.
If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.
No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry’s dreaded “CRA rating.”
The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.
The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.
The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.
HUD, in turn, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie, in turn, donated to the campaigns of leading Democrats like Barney Frank and Pelosi who throttled investigations into fraud at the agencies.
Soon, investment banks such as Bear Stearns were aggressively hawking the securities as “guaranteed.” Wall Street’s pitch was that MBSs were as safe as Treasuries, but with a higher yield.
But they weren’t safe. Everyone in the subprime business — from brokers to lenders to banks to investment houses — absolved themselves of responsibility for ensuring the high-risk loans were good.
The mortgage lenders didn’t care, because they were going to sell the loans to other banks. The banks didn’t care, because they were going to repackage the loans as MBSs. The investors and traders didn’t care, because the MBSs were backed by Fannie and Freddie and their implicit government guarantees.
In other words, nobody up and down the line — from the branch office on main street to the high-rise on Wall Street — analyzed the risk of such ill-advised loans. But why should they? Everybody was just doing what the regulators in Washington wanted them to do.
So everybody won until everybody lost, including the minorities the government originally mandated the banks to serve.
The original culprits in all this were the social engineers who compelled banks to make the bad loans. The private sector has no business conducting social experiments on behalf of government. Its business is making profit. Period. So it did what it naturally does and turned the subprime social mandate into a lucrative industry.
Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme, because they weren’t allowed to play by their rules. The government changed the rules for risk.
In order to put low-income minorities into home loans, they were ordered to suspend lending standards that had served the banking industry well for centuries. No one wants to talk about it, so they just scapegoat Wall Street. Even John McCain has joined the Democrat chorus on this.
The FBI is now investigating 24 large mortgage lenders for alleged abuses. But who will investigate the pols and the lobbyists and the community agitators who made the bad decisions that ultimately forced businesses to make their bad decisions?