“socialized medicine” and the mortgage collapse
From the New York Times daily breakdown of the breakdown of the markets:
Richard F. Syron, chief executive of Freddie Mac, the large buyer of mortgages created by Congress in the 1970s, said yesterday that the speed and severity of the tighter credit terms are surprising, but perhaps necessary given the excesses in the market in recent years.In a telephone interview from Washington, he was wary of the calls by some mortgage industry officials that Freddie Mac and its cousin, Fannie Mae, step in to buy loans and securities that private investors will no longer purchase. Mr. Syron noted that his company was operating under an agreement with its regulator that limited the size of its portfolio.
“There are some loans that are in difficulty” because credit pools are drying up, Mr. Syron said. “There are other loans that probably should never have been made and providing more liquidity will make that situation worse in the long term.”
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are complicated affairs, shareholder-owned, publically-traded companies that operate under a Federal charter that requires them to stabilize the mortgage markets. We don’t have to get all bogged down in the details of this to note something interesting (and obvious - a story that you already know). That is the fact that corporations and the governmentals who do their bidding have no problem calling for mommastate intervention when these guys are knee-deep in their own waste (Do something, government-sponsored enterprise!), but when it comes to protecting the rights to bankruptcy protection for the lowly citizen, or the weaving of any other safety net for the person rather than the spectral limitedliability semipersons, noxious federalization of risk and American self-sufficiency. Remember the discourse that broke down the levees of decency when we all got to watch this on tv together:
