Audit the Fed: Bernanke and the Bankers Are Running Scared

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve mob boss, is running scared. He is deathly afraid an audit of his criminal organization.
“These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States,” Bernanke wrote in the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.

Maybe Bernanke is worried he will be obliged to wear an orange jumpsuit in the wake of an audit.

Bernanke penned his tribute to central banking and globalism prior to his scheduled testimony before a Senate panel on his renomination to serve a second four-year term as Fed mob boss.
Bankster tool Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, tried to derail an effort to audit the Fed but failed. A proposal to audit the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations won a committee vote recently over Frank’s objections.
In his Mockingbird media editorial, Bernanke “conceded the Fed had missed some of the riskiest behavior in the lead up to the crisis. But he said the Fed had helped avoid an even more damaging economic meltdown and has stepped up its policing of the financial system.”
In fact, the Fed was specifically designed to create financial crises. It was all plotted in 1910 when minions of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Rothschilds and Warburgs met on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting. Said Congressman Charles Lindbergh on the midnight passage of the Federal Reserve Act: “From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.”
In order to scientifically create an economic depression, the Fed prompted irresponsible speculation by expanding the money supply sixty-two percent between 1923 and 1929. The so-called Great Depression followed. This depression “was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence,” declared Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee. “The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.”

In March of 1929, Paul Warburg issued a tip that the scientifically created crash was coming. Before it did, John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, Joseph P. Kennedy, and other banksters got out of the market.

A few years later, the banksters and their minions met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and plotted the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The purpose of these two criminal organizations was to set-up a global Federal Reserve system and wage economic warfare on billions of people. The weapon they used was debt and the loss of sovereignty that follows.

In 1971, then president Nixon fit one of the last pieces into the puzzle — he signed an executive order declaring that the United States no longer had to redeem its paper dollars for gold. It was a great day for the banksters and the global elite. The gold standard ensured predictability and regularity in the economy and the banksters wanted to put an end to that. For the bankers, order and control is realized out of chaos and misery.
Fast-forward to the present day. Bernanke’s Fed has meticulously sabotaged the economy in order to create a crisis in classic Hegelian fashion. The corporate media tells us the crisis is the result of ineptitude and mismanagement at the Federal Reserve. Au contraire. Like the Great Depression, the even Greater Depression now on the horizon was scientifically created.
The Fed is the primary instrument the bankers are now using to destroy the middle class, hand over all public assets and resources to them, implement a crushing austerity, usher in a new era of global corporatist feudalism and build a sprawling planet-wide slave plantation based on China’s totalitarian model.
It is the ultimate dream of the banking cartel. It will be used as the foundation to build world government. Destroying the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is only the beginning.
Bernanke knows Ron Paul and the audit the Fed movement are extremely dangerous. That’s why he is pushing this facile “oops” theory. In order to fix things, the Fed will use its “knowledge of complex financial institutions” in order to supervise them, he writes in his Mockingbird editorial. Allowing audits of Federal Reserve monetary policy would increase the perceived influence of Congress on interest rate decisions, he says.

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law school professor advises underwater homeowners to walk away from mortgages
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'I Stopped Denying People': Ex-Bank Of America CSR Tells All

FDIC’s List of ‘Problem’ Banks Grows 33% in Q309

Banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) posted aggregate net income of $2.8bn in Q309 despite net quarterly losses reported by more than 26% of all insured institutions, according to the FDIC’s quarterly report on insured institutions.

Provisions for loan losses totaled $62.5bn in the quarter, an $11.3bn or 22.2% increase over the year-ago quarter. Realized losses on securities and other assets were $4.1bn — $3.8bn lower than last year.

“Today’s report shows that, while bank and thrift earnings have improved, the effects of the recession continue to be reflected in their financial performance,” said FDIC chairman Sheila Bair.

Forty-seven institutions were absorbed through mergers while 50 banks failed in the quarter — the largest number of failures in a single quarter since Q492 when 55 firms failed. The FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) balance fell below zero for the first time since Q392. As of September, the DIF was at negative $8.2bn.

The FDIC’s “problem” bank list swelled nearly 33% to 552 from 416 banks in the previous quarter. The total assets of these “problem” firms grew little more than 15% to $345.9bn from $299.8bn during the same time.

Both the number of banks and the volume of assets on the FDIC’s “problem” list are at their highest level since the end of 1993.

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Mary Landrieu Only Charged Harry Reid $100 Million for Her Health Care Vote

The big news from the weekend, of course, is that the Senate voted 60-39 along purely partisan lines to allow debate on this health care legislation. Can you even imagine? Sixty whole Democrats agreeing to debate a bill, that they wrote, about things that affect the country. Whatever will they do next, tie their shoelaces?

Because the Democrats needed all 60 votes to proceed, Harry Reid spent last week "wooing" (ew!) Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, his party's last holdout and a very coy lady. How coy is she? Try $100 million coy…

[Landrieu], one of three lawmakers being wooed by Democratic leaders to back health-care legislation, won the inclusion of an extra $100 million in federal aid for low-income people in her state.

Landrieu, a Democrat, has championed federal aid for rebuilding Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans area in 2005.

With those funds secured for her state Landrieu voted with the rest of the Dems, and she is so grateful for this consideration that she will spend the rest of the session telling the press that she's just not going to let Harry Reid have that public option he wants so much…

"I believe it's going to be very clear at some point very soon that there are not 60 votes for the [public option] provision in the bill, and that the leader and the leadership are going to have to make a decision and I trust that they will figure out how to do that," Landrieu told reporters.

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Analysis: Fed under fire as public anger mounts

Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody's punching bag.
Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is always fair game for criticism and second-guessing, usually over interest rate actions. But this year the criticism is much broader as Congress responds to widespread public anger that the Fed bailed out Wall Street but not ordinary Americans, and with unemployment in double digits.

Former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. famously said that the central bank's job was to yank away the punchbowl just when everybody is starting to party. And while Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has signalled the Fed will keep interest rates low for now, a round of higher rates inevitably will come.

The Fed finds itself both the punchbowl keeper and the punching bag. Imagine the outcry when it does begin to crank up rates — perhaps just ahead of next year's midterm elections.

Fireworks seem likely at Senate confirmation hearings early next month on President Barack Obama's nomination of Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman.

Many economists and Fed watchers say congressional efforts to rein in the Fed's powers could interfere with the central bank's ability to help guide the fragile economy to recovery.

The Fed's very independence and its unique ability among U.S. institutions to create money out of thin air enabled it to act quickly to stabilize the nation's financial system after it froze up last September after the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment house, Fed backers say.

"It might have been the Fed's finest moment when it had to jump into the market," said David M. Jones, a former Fed economist and president of DMJ Advisors, a Denver-based consulting firm. "We still have to wait to see how effective the Fed is in its exit strategy and whether it can keep inflation in check. But this badgering by Congress, even if there is populist sentiment, is inappropriate."

The Fed's aggressive intervention also set the stage for the current criticism. Many lawmakers question whether the Fed's money machine has mainly benefited financial markets and not the broader economy. Lamakers are also peeved that the central bank acted without congressional involvement when it brokered the 2008 sale of failed investment bank Bear Stearns and engineered the rescue of insurer American International Group.

Bernanke, first appointed by President George W. Bush, has worked closely with both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in confronting the worst financial crisis in decades. Geithner also has gotten his share of congressional wrath, mainly for his administering of the $700 billion bank bailout fund.

"In the past, the Federal Reserve was held in very high esteem," said Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a libertarian who ran a quixotic third-party presidential campaign in 2008. Now, it's "the source of our problem," suggests Paul, author of the bestseller "End the Fed."++

Usually an outlier, Paul suddenly has found an army of at least 307 House colleagues and 30 senators marching behind his legislation to subject the Fed to intense scrutiny by Congress' Government Accountability Office. The House Financial Services Committee endorsed Paul's approach 43-26 last week over objections from its chairman, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.

The bill would authorize Congress to audit not only the Fed's lending programs but its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates. Paul has been introducing a version every year since the early 1980s, but this is the first time it has garnered any serious attention.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who will preside over Bernanke's confirmation hearings, has proposed legislation that would strip the Fed of its bank-regulation authority and give the Senate a role in selecting the 12 regional Federal Reserve bank presidents.

Dodd says his measure would return the Fed to its core mission of setting monetary policy, claiming it proved itself "an abysmal failure" by not cracking down on risky lending practices that led to the financial meltdown.

Dodd is in an extremely tight battle for re-election, even though he has served in Congress for 35 years.

"I don't think it ever hurts to have a member of Congress stand up and denounce the Fed. There is a lot of anger out there, and this is basically a therapeutic gesture," said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

To read the entire article click here

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Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Audit The Fed Bill Approved In House Finance Committee

In an unprecedented defeat for the Federal Reserve, an amendment to audit the multi-trillion dollar institution was approved by the House Finance Committee with an overwhelming and bipartisan 43-26 vote on Thursday afternoon despite harried last-minute lobbying from top Fed officials and the surprise opposition of Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had previously been a supporter.

The measure, cosponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), authorizes the Government Accountability Office to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed's opaque deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions. The Fed has never had a real audit in its history and little is known of what it does with the trillions of dollars at its disposal.

Backers of the Watt amendment pressed their case on Wednesday by sending a letter from a "political cross section of prominent economists" backing a measure like Watt's. HuffPost reported, however, that those economists might well have be prominent, but they certainly aren't a "political cross section." Seven of the eight economists in question have extensive connections to the Fed -- and half of them are currently on the Fed payroll. Those affiliations were not noted in the letter.

The playbook in Washington often goes like this: When a measure that threatens the establishment builds enough momentum that it must be dealt with, it is labeled as "unserious." The Washington Post editorial board, true to the script, called Paul's measure "an unserious answer to a serious question."

And it particularly rankles the center that a pair of "wingnuts" are behind a successful effort to challenge the prevailing order. [See Grayson Called "Wingnut" By New York Times].

For anyone remaining confused, the debate was further clarified by the central bank itself: Federal Reserve Vice Chair Don Cohn and General Counsel Scott Alvarez spent much of the day calling committee members, urging them to oppose the Paul-Grayson amendment in favor of Watt's, a member of Congress who asked for confidentiality told HuffPost.

Paul's opponents also placed a letter from former Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker on the seats of every committee member. Such a move is in violation of House rules and Grayson was able to have the letters removed.

As the day wore on and support held for the Paul-Grayson side, the Fed still could hope that both would pass. Watt's amendment, which included additional restriction, would then trump Paul's.

To counter that possibility, the Paul-Grayson side moved to fully replace Watt's amendment with theirs, leaving only one amendment to vote on. The motion carried and the amendment passed in a landslide.

Frank said he was opposing the Paul amendment because it could be perceived as influencing monetary policy, which can have inflationary pressure. "Perception is very important in monetary policy," said Frank.

He urged a no vote, yet 15 Democrats bucked him, voting with Paul.

"Today was Waterloo for Fed secrecy," a victorious Grayson said afterwards.

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Warren Buffett Increases Stake in Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) Via Berkshire Hathaway (BRK:A) – Is it Ethical?

In its most recent regulatory filing, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK:A) increased its stake in Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) by over 10 million shares in the third quarter.

To me, this does raise ethical questions on the part of the actions and comments of Warren Buffett, who has been backing up the bailout of banking and other institutions on the one hand, while investing millions in one of those institutions, which has largely benefited from the use of taxpayer dollars.

Not only will those benefits help Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway short-term through their huge stake in Wells Fargo, but it will also, more significantly, help them over the long term as a small number of financial institutions emerge from the rubble of the bailouts and become more powerful and dominant in their industry; something Warren Buffett seeks and looks for to invest in when deciding on the best companies. This is well documented from hundreds of comments from Buffett in regard to that strategy through the years.

The reason I call attention to possible ethics issues is Buffett knows full well that every word he speaks is taken as financial gospel by not only his followers and adherents, but many of those that recognize him as an investing celebrity. So when he says we needed the bailouts, he was positioning himself in a way that was setting his holding company Berkshire Hathaway up for a profit. To say that Buffett would have been ignorant of this would be to deny his sharpness in evaluating and investing in companies throughout the decades. He knew it, and that’s troubling to me.

I’ve always respected Warren Buffett as an investor, and I believe he has helped hundreds of thousands of people build wealth through his particular system and way of investing. But his moving on to the public stage in a political manner in order to shore up the Obama administrations bailout efforts can’t be just looked upon as a personal political philosophy espoused by Buffett, as he lost that right a long time ago to make statements in that manner when he knows it’ll move the market.

So when Warren Buffett backed up the bailouts with his huge interest in Wells Fargo, he and others had to know that Berkshire Hathaway and Buffett would wildly profit from it. And he has.

The results of the more dominant market position of Wells Fargo after being bailed out by taxpayers will be positively felt for years to come; far beyond Buffett’s time on earth. Was it fair and ethical for Warren Buffett to spew out his support of bailouts and then wildly benefit from it. I don’t believe so.

While this doesn’t surprise me on the part of Buffett as to his political leanings, which can be found in his Berkshire Hathaway reports easily, it is disappointing to see him take advantage of publicly communicating that in order to build up the wealth of Berkshire Hathaway, his shareholders, and himself.
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Lender That Really Does God’s Work Is Slowed by Funding Decline

Mark Holbrook helped fuel a church construction boom by originating more than $3 billion of mortgages in the past decade, transforming a $2 million credit union he joined after Bible college into the largest U.S. evangelical lender.

Evangelical Christian Credit Union, run by Holbrook since 1979, was the leading force behind the increase in credit flowing to churches in the form of five-year commercial mortgages with minimal monthly payments and lower initial costs than bond sales, the other widely used form of financing. Unlike the banks that joined the trend, ECCU catered exclusively to evangelical ministries, putting 83 percent of its assets in loans on churches and religious schools.

Now, the Brea, California-based company’s delinquency rate has more than doubled since the end of 2007 and mortgage originations have slumped because of a decline in financing. Commercial church mortgages are coming due with so-called balloon payments, replacement loans have disappeared and the highest unemployment rate in 26 years has cut congregant donations.

About 145 churches have gone into bankruptcy since the credit crunch accelerated in 2008, an upheaval in a lending niche that bankers once ranked among the safest in real estate.

“We have seen more church foreclosures and bank-pressured sales, if you will, in this last year than we have seen in 20 years,” said Matthew Messier, a principal at CNL Specialty Real Estate Services Corp., a broker in Orlando, Florida, that caters to religious and educational clients. “A lot of people think commercial is going to get worse before it gets better, and it could be the same for many churches.”

‘Unsettling Rumors’
Rising delinquencies have led to speculation about ECCU’s financial health, the company said. Chief Financial Officer Brian Scharkey, appearing in a video discussing the company’s third-quarter finances, said there were “some unsettling rumors floating around” among ministry leaders, including the possibility that ECCU might go bankrupt.

“ECCU is one of the healthiest institutions in the country,” Holbrook said in the video on ECCU’s Web site, citing a capital ratio of 11 percent that he called among the highest in the industry. “We don’t see any even remote possibility of bankruptcy on the horizon.”

Still, some ministries are having trouble repaying ECCU. As of Sept. 30, about 10.7 percent of the $943 million of first mortgages held by ECCU were more than 30 days overdue, according to a filing with the National Credit Union Association. That’s an increase from 6.9 percent a year earlier and 4.2 percent at the end of 2007.

Losses Remain Low

In comparison, Bank of the West, a unit of France’s BNP Paribas SA with $1.2 billion of church loans, has a 30-day delinquency rate of less than 1 percent, according to spokesman John Stafford. The delinquency rate for commercial real estate loans held by all U.S. banks was 7.7 percent at the end of June, according to data from the Federal Reserve.

The rising delinquencies haven’t resulted in substantial write-offs, in part because ECCU loans on average equal 58 percent of underlying property values, providing a buffer against potential losses on the sale of foreclosed mortgages, according to Mark Johnson, an ECCU vice president. The company, which had never charged off a church mortgage prior to 2007, has since had about $4.3 million in losses, including $3.14 million during the first nine months of this year.

That equals about 0.39 percent of average loans, compared with a charge-off rate of 2.24 percent for commercial lenders overall, according to Federal Reserve data for the end of June.

“These churches are broadly and significantly keeping their commitments,” Johnson said in an interview. ECCU works with congregations to restructure their finances and avoid foreclosure, Holbrook said in the video.
Construction Boom

Holbrook, 59, landed a job at ECCU’s predecessor credit union in 1975, about a year after graduating from Biola University, formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He was running the company within four years, and positioned it to feed an expansion in which annual spending on houses of worship would rise to $6.3 billion in 2007 from $3.8 billion in 1997, according to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington.

Holbrook in 1987 shifted ECCU’s lending to evangelical ministries from individual customers, and in 1998 hired the lobbying firm William D. Harris & Associates to successfully obtain an exemption from legislation that bars credit unions from having more than 12.25 percent of assets in business loans. At the end of 2008, about 123 credit unions had been granted the exemption, which allows ECCU to write more loans for churches. There are about 7,770 credit unions in the U.S.

Ministry as Bank

“We are a ministry structured as a credit union that functions as a commercial bank” said Jac La Tour, a spokesman for ECCU.

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., created a stir when he told the Sunday Times of London that he’s just a banker “doing God’s work.” Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for the New York-based bank, later said Blankfein’s comment was “an obviously ironic, throwaway response.”
At ECCU, whose mission is to “increase the effectiveness of evangelical ministries,” first-mortgage originations soared to $661 million in 2008 from $50 million in 2000, according to company filings with the credit union administration in Alexandria, Virginia.

Market Leader

That’s more than half of the combined $1 billion in mortgages written annually by the top 10 church lenders, including Bank of the West in San Francisco and Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, said David Dennison, principal at Church Mortgage Solutions, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, company that helps ministries obtain financing.

ECCU has originated almost $3.2 billion in first mortgages overall since 2000.
“ECCU had the largest share of the market, probably by a lot,” Holbrook said in a telephone interview.

The credit union long prospered, according to company documents that show its return on assets averaged 1.66 percent during the past decade, compared with 0.75 percent for peers.

Now, ECCU has curtailed lending because the credit unions that financed its operations have pulled back, according to Holbrook. Its mortgage originations fell to $130.6 million in the first nine months of 2009 from $579.1 million a year earlier, filings show. This comes at a time when many churches face balloon payments on maturing five-year mortgages provided by ECCU earlier in the decade.

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The new flipping: short sales

Untold millions of dollars that banks could have recovered from the sale of distressed Florida homes have instead been pocketed as profits by a new breed of property flipper.

These flippers target houses on the verge of foreclosure and persuade banks and mortgage companies to accept lowball buyouts, sometimes by using questionable appraisals and not disclosing that a quick sale at a higher price has already been arranged, experts say.

No one knows how widespread the scheme has become. But a national glut of short sales -- pre-foreclosure sales in which the lender agrees to let the house sell for less than the mortgage owed -- has spawned a small industry of short-sale flippers, some of whom use these questionable tactics, experts say.

The Herald-Tribune examined nearly 18,000 property sales that occurred in Sarasota and Manatee counties in 2009. The review showed that:

• 
  At least 250 properties have been sold multiple times at escalating prices so far this year. Nearly 50 of those properties were bought then resold within 24 hours, suggesting that banks were underpaid for properties that already had a buyer willing to pay more.
• Just the most suspicious sales, where properties flipped within a day, have cost banks $1.7 million in Sarasota and Manatee counties so far this year. On houses bought and resold within a month, the bank short sales were $3.2 million less than the houses fetched just a few days or weeks later.
• 
  Real estate professionals are a key part of short sale flipping. Of about 120 short sale properties that sold twice within a month in the Sarasota area, more than half of the buyers or sellers were real estate agents, real estate attorneys or mortgage brokers.
• 
  Questionable short sales accounted for 1.4 percent of all property sales in Sarasota and Manatee counties this year.
  At the peak of the housing bubble, 2 percent of all sales statewide raised suspicions, based on criteria used by fraud investigators.
• 
  Bankers and some organizations that regulate the real estate industry have taken steps to curb the latest form of flipping. But the measures, including restrictions on writing mortgages for flipped properties, have not halted questionable transactions. Experts warn the number of short sale flips is likely to continue growing nationwide.

Short sales are viewed as a crucial part of a real estate market recovery. They allow distressed homeowners to escape huge debts and let banks avoid foreclosure costs and still recoup some of the money they are owed.

And flips involving short sale properties can be legitimate if repairs are made to a property, or the original buyer pays one price in good faith and later finds another buyer willing to pay more.

In fact, some professional flippers are outspoken in defending flipping as aiding both homeowners and banks.

"Who cares if someone is making a spread on flipped properties," said Marc Pelletz, a real estate investor and agent with Hook & Ladder Realty in Sarasota. "Banks are getting money. Someone gets a deal. As long as everything is disclosed to everyone, what's wrong?"

But fraud experts warn that some of the real estate flipping they see today involves the same kind of insider deals and manipulated sale prices that plagued the housing bubble.

The FBI recently added short sale flipping, dubbed "flopping" by some mortgage fraud experts, to its list of recognized real estate fraud.

In a June 2009 report on mortgage fraud, FBI officials described various forms of short sale flipping fraud. Each type involves misrepresenting the value of a house to a lender.

Banking experts point out that those losses trickle down to taxpayers, who have bailed out the banking industry.

"These middle men are making a huge profit at the expense of banks, which means they are often making huge profits at the expense of taxpayers," said Anne Weintraub, a real estate attorney with the Syprett Meshad law firm in Sarasota.

LUCRATIVE BUSINESS
The evidence that short sale flippers are finding ways to benefit from bank losses can be found in deed records filed along Florida's Gulf Coast.
Some individual investors and small groups of flippers have bought dozens of properties at discount prices and resold them within days, each time for thousands of dollars in profit.

Since September 2008, Tampa real estate agent Joe Wright and accountant Kevin Byrne have worked together to buy more than 30 pre-foreclosure houses and condos, with Wright's brokerage as the listing agent and Byrne's company as the buyer.

In each case, the men arranged a short sale and quickly resold the property at a higher price. Of their 33 deals, 22 properties resold within 24 hours of purchase. The median one-day price increase was $25,000.
Byrne and Wright did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

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Roubini: For unemployment "the worst is yet to come"

Nouriel Roubini, writing in the New York Daily News , said on Sunday that “unemployed Americans should hunker down for more job losses” given the likelihood of a job less recovery. This was as gloomy a piece as I have seen from Roubini in the past few months. He has clearly become more downbeat about the long-term picture for the U.S. economy.

The article begins:

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%…

…we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

This sounds dire. As a result, Roubini goes on to call on the Obama Administration to take direct action on jobs. Extending unemployment benefits is not going to cut it. Roubini says we need:

a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.

With statistics showing that the rate of long-term joblessness is at the highest since the Great Depression, Roubini joins an increasing number of economists who are calling on the Obama Administration to take the employment situation more seriously.

Paul Krugman has said that we are now in a liquidity trap. Therefore, we need to subsidize jobs and promote work sharing as Germany is doing.

I have made similar arguments about quantitative easing for the past year. Monetary policy is effectively useless – and is merely creating bubbles.

The Obama Administration is moving into deficit hawk mode at the wrong time as this will only worsen the jobs situation and lead to a double dip recession. Instead, I have called for a payroll tax cut or a job subsidy.

Randall Wray, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has also offered a unique job solution.

All of this is urgent, as Roubini indicates:

Based on my best judgment, it is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and will remain at a very high level for two years or more.

The weakness in labor markets and the sharp fall in labor income ensure a weak recovery of private consumption and an anemic recovery of the economy, and increases the risk of a double dip recession…

The damage will be extensive and severe unless bold policy action is undertaken now.

The Obama Administration is taking an ‘indirect’ approach. They do so for three reasons. First, they are afraid of being boxed in politically by taking more direct measures. They also see a need to defend their previous policy decisions. But, Mark Thoma thinks part of the resistance to more direct measures is ideological. In a post earlier today, he says:

Growth policy is an attempt to make the economy grow faster, and stabilization policy attempts to keep the economy as close as possible to that trend, i.e. to avoid business cycles.

When Republicans had the political microphone, they emphasized growth policy (because it allowed them to argue for what they really wanted, lower taxes, growth policy was simply the vehicle that allowed them to get there), and this was supported by academic work from people such as Robert Lucas who claimed that, from a welfare perspective, stabilization was of second order concern, growth policy was where policymakers should focus their effort if they wanted to enhance welfare. Summers’ remarks reflect this type of thinking.

The Obama Administration’s approach of focusing on deficit reduction without enough direct job measures is sure to keep unemployment elevated. In looking at the politics of economics I said recently: ...

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Barofsky Says TARP ‘Almost Certainly’ Will Bring Loss to U.S.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the $700 billion U.S. financial-industry bailout, said the program will “almost certainly” result in a loss to taxpayers.

“We need to temper or be realistic about our expectations, a dollar-for-dollar return is just highly unrealistic,” he said yesterday at the Bloomberg Washington Summit. “It’s almost certainly going to be a loss.”

Barofsky, who has been charged by Congress with policing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, also said he’s conducting 65 investigations of possible fraud. The former federal prosecutor has pressed the Treasury Department to be more open about the rescue of companies including insurer American International Group Inc. and automakers General Motors Co. and Chrysler LLC.

“Tens of billions of dollars are likely to be lost on the automotive bailout,” Barofsky said. In addition, some banks that received TARP money are failing, so the aid they received will be wiped out.

Barofsky also said he is working on a review of how the government exercises its rights as a shareholder in the auto companies, Citigroup Inc. and other firms in which it holds large stakes.

“We’re looking into this issue from the perspective of corporate governance,” Barofsky said. “What is the role the United States is playing in the management of these companies?”

Barofsky said his office is set to release an audit next week that looks at whether AIG paid more than necessary to banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. after the insurer’s bailout.

AIG Bailout
Lawmakers, frustrated with the cost of an AIG bailout that has expanded three times, have asked why about $50 billion was paid after the initial September rescue to banks that bought credit-default swaps from the firm.

Asked about the potential for fraud in the bailout program, Barofsky said the 65 open investigations range from complex securities matters to routine mortgage-fraud cases.

About half those probes were begun or aided by tips from corporate insiders, victims or the public that came into the office’s fraud hotline, Barofsky said.
“When I first took office, I can’t tell you how many times I’d be having a sit-down and warning about potential fraud in the program and I would hear a response basically saying, ‘Oh, they’re bankers, and they wouldn’t put their reputations at risk by committing fraud,’” he said.

“I think we’ve done a good job of instilling a greater degree of skepticism that what comes from Wall Street isn’t necessarily the Holy Grail,” he said.
‘Extremely Unlikely’

Last month, in a report to Congress, Barofsky said taxpayers are “extremely unlikely” to earn any return on the aid. He said it’s impossible to determine what the actual loss will be because some programs are still being rolled out by the government.

Barofsky praised the Obama administration and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for making TARP contracts available on the Web and for releasing details of the stress tests on the biggest U.S. banks.

In an Oct. 5 report, Barofsky found that the government “lost credibility” after saying that its first round of assistance for banks was only for healthy firms. He said the Treasury had concerns about the finances of Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup, which were both later given additional funds.

Bernanke, Paulson
The inspector also concluded in that report that ex- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke didn’t illegally pressure Bank of America to complete its acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co. While Bank of America considered ending the deal last December after Merrill’s losses spiraled, Paulson and Bernanke ...

To read the original article click here

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FDIC boss: Big banks still aren't lending enough

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Tuesday she's "very worried" that the nation's biggest banks aren't lending enough and warned the economy could take another turn for the worse without increased access to credit.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said the FDIC's upcoming quarterly report would show that "not many large institutions are doing a very good job of lending." Instead, she said, some are taking advantage of near-zero interest rates by borrowing dollars cheaply to buy higher-yielding assets like stocks or commodities — a move known as the "carry trade."

"I don't see much money going out (from banks). I see a lot of carry trade," Bair told a banking conference in New York. "It used to be you take deposits and you lend out money. We'd like to see more of that."

Many banks have tightened lending standards following a wave of residential and commercial property defaults. Others say they want to lend but see little demand as consumers and businesses seek to pay off debt, not take on more.

The lack of lending by large banks is dangerous at a time when many small and midsize banks are teetering on the brink amid the economic downturn, Bair said.

"I'm very worried (that) the larger institutions don't seem like they're stepping up to the plate providing credit," Bair said. "Because if they don't do that, we're all in the soup."

Addressing the rash of bank failures, Bair said the FDIC had enough funds to shut down troubled banks and would tap its line of credit with the Treasury only as a last resort. There have been 120 bank failures this year, and Bair predicted "many more" ahead.

To read the original article click here

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European stock markets rose modestly Thursday as investor optimism was dented by a subdued performance in Asia. Wall Street was expected to retreat after the Standard & Poor's 500 index failed to close above 1,100 the day before.
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Ireland’s EU54 Billion Gamble on Banks, Property Nears Approval
The biggest financial gamble in modern Irish history is about to exit the realms of theory and enter the real world.

How Banks View Loan Modifications

I can’t think of any subject that has been so widely and frequently discussed and studied, over such a long period of time, by such a large number of experts and observers, who continually espouse such a diverse range of opinions and cite such a large number of conflicting facts, that is still is so misunderstood… or understood differently by different people… or in short, is such a mess… that affects so many people… and is so important to our government and our economy… yet remains pretty much unsolvable… AS LOAN MODIFICATIONS.

See… loan modifications today represent such a complex subject that even writing a sentence describing the situation surrounding them, such as the one above, was a pain in the neck.

Let’s start with the questions on everyone’s mind… Why aren’t more loans getting modified? Why is it so difficult to get the bank to modify a mortgage? Why are trial modifications ending in foreclosure? Why is it that people are consistently treated so poorly by the banks? Is it the investors that are making it hard to get a loan modification? Is the government doing enough to get banks to modify loans? And should people hire an attorney to help them obtain a loan modification, or go it alone? That’s at least a pretty good start, right?

I think the fundamental thing that almost no one understands involves how a bank views a borrower’s request for a loan modification. Lot’s of people, including me in past articles, have said that banks simply don’t want to modify mortgages. Lot’s of people, including me, have also pointed out that servicers make more money by foreclosing than modifying loans.

All of those points apply in certain circumstances, but they’re also beside the point to some degree.

A Banker’s View…

Your bank views you calling to request that your mortgage be modified as the beginning of a process. Maybe you truly need and deserve a loan modification, but maybe not. The only way the bank will be able to tell one way or the other is by putting you through that process, and it’s not a pleasant process in the least.
Let’s say that you’re someone that has good credit, you’ve never missed a payment, and now are saying that you need your loan modified or you may lose your home to foreclosure. When you call your bank to ask about a loan modification, they’re going to tell you that they can’t talk to you until your payment is delinquent by at least 30 days.

You hang up the phone. You’re disappointed. And you now have your first decision to make: Do you let your credit score get trashed by going 30 days late on your mortgage? It’s not easy decision. Once you head down that path it’ll be years before your credit score is back up where it’s always been, and if you need your credit to be good for other reasons, chances are you’ll decide that you no longer want a loan modification because the cost of trying to get one… sacrificing your credit score… is too high.

The bank’s process has just saved the bank quite a bit of money. Had the bank agreed to modify your loan, it would have been like throwing money away unnecessarily because you kept making your payments without them having to modify your loan.

Now, let’s say that you decide to go 30 days delinquent on your mortgage. You call back, now 30 days late, but now your bank tells you that you have to be 90 days late before you can be transferred to a negotiator. You hang up the phone. Again, you’re disappointed. Do you go 90 days late, or do you bring your loan current and forget the whole thing? Some bring their loans current, others don’t.

If you don’t bring your loan back to current status, you’re about to start receiving a series of letters and phone calls designed to make you feel ashamed, guilty and scared. And those letters will come more and more frequently, and they’ll be written using stronger and stronger terms. And chances are you’ll feel worse and worse as time goes by.

Then in 90 days, assuming you’ve gone the distance, you call the bank again. This time they’ll tell you that your credit score is now too low to qualify for a loan modification. Now you’re enraged. You stomp your feet. And then, if there’s anyway you can do it, chances are you bring your loan current and try to forget the whole idea of a loan modification. Maybe you get rid of a car payment to do it, maybe you rent out a room or take on a part-time job to generate the extra income you need, or maybe you borrow the money from a relative.

You never even bring up the whole experience to your friends or family members because you’re ashamed that it even happened. You’re ashamed that you were having trouble making the mortgage payment that you signed up for, and you’re ashamed about having gone 90 days late on your mortgage payment and almost losing your home. The whole thing becomes one of those skeletons that you hope will soon fade away in your closet of memories.

Besides, what would your friends or family members even say if you did tell them? Do you think they’d be on your side and angry at the way your bank treated you? Or would they take the view that the bank had every right to handle your situation the way they did, because after all, you signed the mortgage and agreed to make the payments… the bank has no obligation to lower your payment just because you having trouble making it. You’re lucky the bank didn’t foreclose, in the eyes of your friends or family members.

Oh, and one or two more things, while we’re at it… maybe you should have opted for a little less house and not gone quite so far out on a limb… maybe you should have spent a little less on your car too, and not used your credit cards for all those nice clothes you wear… maybe you’re just living way beyond your means. You’re probably not saving for retirement either. You’re one of THOSE irresponsible people and maybe losing your home to foreclosure would teach you a lesson.

Whew… it’s exhausting, isn’t it?

But, let’s say for a moment that you could not find a way to bring your mortgage payment current when told, when you were 90 days delinquent, that your score was now to low to qualify for a modification. Now you’re 120 days behind, and soon it’s been six months since you’ve made a payment to your bank on your loan.

By now the bank is sending you the most threatening letters imaginable. They could foreclose at any moment, according to the letters and their tone tells you that you are basically an irresponsible failure who cannot be trusted because your word means nothing. You promised to make the payment and now you’re not living up to that promise. You’re a promise breaker… a liar. How do you sleep at night? You shouldn’t even have friends, because if your friends knew what you were up to, they likely wouldn’t want to be your friend anymore.

Nonetheless, you’re now seven months late, then eight, and then nine. Now the bank is calling you almost daily, the pressure is becoming unbearable, you’re trying everything to make more money so that you can make the payment. If you do find a way to come up with the cash, you bring your mortgage payment current immediately. If you get a new job that pays more, you call your bank and start begging and explaining that everything is going to be okay… you’re working again… if they’d just please understand… you’re a good person… you’ll pay your payment every month and on time from now on… you’re sooooo sorry to have gotten behind… How about $1200 this week, and then $1200 the following week, and then $2000 by the end of the… blah, blah, blah.

You’re a babbling fool that will agree to just about anything the bank says at that moment. If the person you’re talking to at the bank acts the slightest bit nice to you, or comes off as even a little bit understanding of your situation… you gush with appreciation and feel like you want to be their BFF. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you… really… thank you so much. My husband thanks you, my children thanks you… my dog thanks you. Yuck. It’s disgusting, really. I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Or, maybe that’s not what happens. And now you’re almost eleven months late. You’re working. You could make a reasonable payment if you weren’t so far behind. You’ll never be able to pay off the arrears though, so what’s the point. You’re desperate… you’re about to give up and resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to lose your home to foreclosure. You’re trying to get used to the idea that you’ll soon be packing and calling the moving truck… its heart wrenching for anyone to watch.

Well, guess what? Depending on the specifics of your situation… whether there’s any equity in your home… how far underwater you are… how long are homes like yours and in your area remaining on the market before being sold? Things like that.

Do you see what’s going on?
Since foreclosure is now imminent, the bank can’t threaten to ruin your credit score anymore, as it’s already ‘F’ and would be ‘G’ if scores went that low.

The bank is now trying to figure out two things:
1. What is the likelihood of you being able to make the payment if the bank modifies your loan? What if they take the amount in arrears, tack it on to the back end of the loan, and reduce your monthly payment by a couple hundred a month? Would that do it? Or would you agree to the deal and then not be able to make the modified payment… and again in six months end up right back in foreclosure where you are now.

If the bank thinks that might happen, they won’t modify your loan. They’d rather foreclose now than go through this same thing next year and end up foreclosing then. Real estate values will likely be lower next year, so by waiting the bank just assures itself of a bigger loss on the property.

The cost of foreclosure to your bank is going to be 30% to 50%, or even more in the worst of instances. But that’s not the most important factor to your bank… this is all about your bank’s degree of certainty that if they modify your loan, you won’t be back in foreclosure anytime soon, and likely never. Your bank views a loan modification as pretty close to unthinkable in the first place, so it’s unquestionable that it’s a once in a lifetime thing in their eyes. You should be too embarrassed to even ask a bank to modify a loan a second time, according to your bank. It’s almost like… if that happens, you’ll probably want to change your name and move to another state. What a load of crap the banks have peddled our way all these years.

So, you see… it’s a range. In order to get your loan modified, you need to fall somewhere between “Definitely won’t default again if loan reasonably modified,” and “Will self-cure the mortgage before home is actually taken back by the bank”. Get it?

I talk to people all the time that have recently applied for a loan modification, and they always talk to me about how it will cost the bank more to foreclose on their particular house, so they expect the bank to modify the loan. But then the bank refuses, and I hear people say that they can’t understand it because the bank should do what’s in the best interests of investors. Then we start talking about how servicers make more money foreclosing, all of which is true.

The problem with this line of thinking, however, is that it fails to incorporate all the data… it’s not just a numbers game to the bank. First they need to know, if they offer you nothing, will you really end up losing the home to foreclosure, or will you let the Devil himself rent out a room to avoid that shameful outcome? Then they need to know that if they do accommodate you and provide you with a modification, chances are good that you’ll never miss a payment for the rest of your life.

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Economic forecasts in bank tests miss their mark

Bank tests find all but GMAC raised enough capital, but economic forecasts prove unrealistic

All but one of the 19 largest banks have raised the extra capital cushion regulators said they'd need to withstand a deeper recession -- a sign, the Treasury secretary said, of how much the financial system has improved since the crisis began.

But the banks' capital needs were based on unrealistic economic projections. Some have proved too rosy, others too grim.

For example, the test envisioned unemployment reaching 8.9 percent this year; it stands at 10.2 percent.

On the other hand, the tests assumed housing prices would fall 22 percent this year in a worst-case scenario. Instead, they fell 5.5 percent in the first half of the year and have risen for the past three months.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration subjected the 19 largest banks to "stress tests." The goal was to boost confidence in the financial sector by showing how strong banks' balance sheets were. Regulators used a series of economic projections to see if banks could withstand the losses they would suffer in case of a deeper-than-expected recession.

But the recession diverged far from the economic projections used. Analysts say their results reveal little about what troubles the banks now face. Though conditions have improved since the depths of the credit crisis, some analysts say certain banks face problems the stress-test buffers may not solve.

"We're already at record numbers on losses, and those numbers are rising," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics.

The test results in May found that 10 of the 19 largest banks needed more capital to withstand losses they would suffer if the recession worsened. They were given six months to raise a total of $74.6 billion of capital. The Federal Reserve said Monday that they have raised a total of $77 billion.

Whalen said that if the banks approach the loss rates the stress tests envisioned, they still might not have enough capital to stay afloat.

The only bank that failed to raise the required capital was GMAC, which is weighed down by bad mortgage loans but provides financing to auto dealers and buyers. Regulators had said GMAC needed to raise an additional $11.5 billion.

The company is in talks with the Treasury Department about getting a fresh bailout from the $700 billion financial rescue fund. It is unclear how much money it will require. But Secretary Timothy Geithner said it "is expected to be lower than anticipated" when the stress test results were announced.

GMAC already has received $12.5 billion of taxpayer money. The Detroit-based lender is in "active dialogue" with Treasury about its next round of bailout money, said spokeswoman Gina Proia. Those funds will be used to fulfill the stress test requirement "and not to resolve any new matter related to our business," she added.

GMAC provides wholesale financing to many General Motors and Chrysler dealerships to pay for the vehicles on their lots. The company also operates a mortgage lending unit -- Residential Capital -- which has been pummeled by the housing market downturn. It runs an insurance unit and an online banking unit called Ally Bank.

Geithner said the success of the other 18 companies showed that the financial sector has become far more stable since January.

"Banks are repaying the taxpayers with interest and credit is coming back, but we need to reinforce that improvement and ensure that small and medium sized businesses can borrow to create jobs," he said in a statement.

Whalen said that despite government subsidies, banks like GMAC and Citigroup Inc. still are too troubled to extend credit and support an economic recovery.

"These are zombies and they can't make loans," he said. "None of this is helping the real economy."

Whalen said the only way to improve the companies would be to push them into bankruptcy and get rid of the bad assets that are weighing them down.
GMAC could not raise money in part because investors needed to charge high interest rates to offset the risk that the company could fail.

The nine other banks, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup, raised the money from private investors, by selling assets or by converting preferred equity into common shares.

GMAC was previously owned by General Motors Corp. GM later sold a majority stake and GMAC spread its lending into other areas, such as home mortgages.

Like most financial companies, GMAC struggled to find financing when the credit markets seized up. Its bonds are rated at junk status by major ratings agencies, further complicating its ability to raise new funds. GMAC recently used a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. program to help it issue debt backed by the government's top rating.

Analysts have suggested that a further infusion of government aid could help improve GMAC's financial stability. But it remains dependent on a broader economic recovery in some of its key markets, like autos, Moody's Investors Service analyst Mark Wasden wrote in a credit research note last week.
"GMAC's ratings will be constrained as long as recovery in the auto industry remains elusive," Wasden said.

The stress tests subjected banks' balance sheets to two economic scenarios. One was meant to look like the recession and recovery analysts expected. The second was envisioned as a much worse recession.

Banks were told to raise enough money to withstand the losses they would see under the harsher scenario.

To read the entire article click here

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Five Reasons the U.S. Doesn't Need More Home-Buyer Perks

Congress is working on a new and even more generous set of perks for house buyers. A tentative deal in the U.S. Senate would extend the closing deadline for an $8,000 subsidy for first-time buyers to July 1 from Nov. 30. It would also boost the program's income limits for singles to $125,000 from $75,000 and for couples to $250,000 from $150,000, and would offer a new $6,500 reward for existing homeowners who buy again. (More on the home buyer tax credit.)

The National Association of Realtors has called such an extension "essential." The Mortgage Bankers Association agrees. The National Association of Home Builders says, "Failure to act now could derail the fragile housing recovery even before it has time to take root."

I respectfully disagree for perhaps a dozen reasons. Let me offer five.
Subsidies raise prices, and house prices are already too high.

Consumer subsidies puff up buying power, which artificially increases demand, which raises prices. With most goods, manufacturers respond by increasing supply, which brings costs back down. Some goods face constraints to new supply, though. We can build more colleges, but we can't magically make more of the longstanding, prestigious kind. We can make more pills, but we can't violate drug makers' patents on popular ones. And we can build new houses, but there's only so much space (or building permission) in the choicest locations. That produces a paradox: America's government has for decades spent mightily on affordability initiatives for college courses, health care and houses, and yet prices for all three goods have increased faster than the rate of inflation, resulting in less affordability.

In April 2007 I wrote that houses had gotten so expensive that renting had come to make more financial sense. In July, with prices down about 30% nationwide, I charted them against rents and incomes to show that the country was closing in on its historical level of housing affordability, but wasn't quite there yet. It never did get there. Prices in most markets have increased each month since then. We're moving away from normal, not toward it. When the National Association of Home Builders speaks of a "fragile housing recovery," it means an increase in prices. But what about a recovery of the ability of ordinary Americans to buy houses at fair prices? That recovery might have to wait.

The house subsidy has little value as economic stimulus.
The current $8,000 payment to house buyers was proposed as more than a simple perk. The law that created it is titled the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Proponents cited the spillover effect of house purchases on the rest of the economy. Putting aside the matter of whether stimulus spending helps (until item No. 3), the most useful stimulus spending does one or both of these two things well: It begets more spending then it provides, or it leaves behind something useful. Food stamps create $1.73 in economic activity for every $1 we spend, reckons Moody's Economy.com. That makes sense. The poor spend just about everything that falls into their hands, and the money they spend at food markets leads grocers to spend with suppliers, and suppliers to spend with farmers, and so on. A dollar spent on unemployment benefits creates an estimated $1.63 in economic activity and one spent on infrastructure, $1.59. The result of these things? Bellies are filled, the jobless are given a lift and roads and power grids are upgraded (and, of course, a bit is wasted along the way).

Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution, a think tank, estimates that only about 15% of house buyers who've received $8,000 payments to date wouldn't have bought houses without the payments. The good news is that suggests the payments have played only a minor role in house prices reversing, and so we might not get much more of a run-up in prices from extending the plan. The bad news is that we're wasting money. A dollar spent on the housing credit creates an estimated 90 cents of economic activity. That's not a multiplier effect. It's a divisor effect.

The benefits of stimulus spending are unproven.
There's a reason economics is categorized as a social science in course catalogs and such. It's to differentiate it from actual sciences, like physics and chemistry. While economists use scientific methods, much of what they study can't be tested in a highly controlled setting, and so can't be known for sure. On the subject of large, industrialized nations spending government funds to hasten the end of a severe economic slowdown, there are only two applicable case studies. One is Japan over the past two decades and the other is America during the Great Depression. Japan's economic woes haven't ended. And the Great Depression isn't called "great" because of how quickly we fixed it.

Maybe the sudden rise in gross domestic product reported Thursday is a sign the stimulus efforts have worked, or maybe it means we've paid dearly for a temporary blip in the numbers.

America has no money.
Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier. America was last debt-free in 1835. The last year it spent less than it collected from taxpayers was 2001. In the government's fiscal 2009, which ended Sept. 31, it overspent by an estimated $1.4 trillion, more than ever before in dollars, and more than any year since 1945 in proportion to the size of the economy. Perks for house buyers don't come from the government, ultimately. They come from taxpayers, either this year or in future years when the debt is paid.

By Nov. 30, the government will have spent an estimated $8.5 billion on its current round of house-buyer payments. (A Treasury Department inspector estimates that $139 million of that went to fraudsters who didn't actually buy houses, but I'm trying to keep my list of grievances to five.) Early projections for the proposed extension say it will cost close to $12 billion. Together, the programs would cost the average household more than $170 if the bill were paid right away. But it's borrowed money. The interest rates charged to America for its debt at the moment are blessedly low--about 3.5% on 10-year loans. The average since the 1960s is 6.9%. Let's split the difference and assume the nation will pay roughly 5% on its debt over the next 30 years, the time it might take one of those $8,000 subsidy recipients to pay off the mortgage. By then the program's true cost will have increased more than fourfold.

We already spend plenty on housing stimulus.
We already have programs that draw funds from all taxpayers and divert them to house buyers. The mortgage interest deduction does just that, only its benefits are reserved for those who borrow to buy houses, and for those whose incomes are high enough to make hunting for deductions come tax time more worthwhile than claiming the standard deduction. The interest deduction is what's called a tax expenditure. It will cost just over $100 billion this year, or about $850 per taxpaying household. Not enough? There's more. Interest rates are kept low at the moment by aggressive buying of mortgage securities by the Federal Reserve. We can't say for sure how much that will cost. It depends on how many of the underlying borrowers make good on their payments, which depends in part on how much of their own money they put into the deal to begin with. Did I mention that the $8,000 house-buyer perk can be used for a down payment?

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