Vodkapundit

By Stephen Green

Bio

Get Updates From Stephen Green

Required Reading

March 7, 2009 - 11:14 am - by Stephen Green

Henry Blodget:

While Obama’s team desperately cooks up one flawed plan after another to save the banking and housing systems, it’s worth noting that the private market is already doing it.

The private market’s solution does all the things the government wants its bailouts to do:

It keeps homeowners in their homes
It gets crap assets off bank balance sheets
It gets money flowing through the economy again.

The private market’s solution also has several advantages that the government’s bailouts do not.

Read the rest here. But in the meantime, take comfort that the President isn’t letting a perfectly good crisis go to waste.

PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:

1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.

2. Stay on topic.

3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.

4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.

5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.

These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that PJ Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. Please note that comments are reviewed by the editorial staff and may not be posted immediately. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pjmedia.com.

3 Comments, 3 Threads

  1. 1. Charlie Martin

    The best part is that this is essentially identical to the plan that Paulson explained — but didn’t implement — with the TARP.

    March 7, 2009 - 11:19 am   Link to this Comment
  2. 2. jon

    I like that plan, but the big players don’t. What it does is screws everyone by lowering home prices, and what I mean by “screws everyone” is that it lets those prices become sane again. Sanity is something that the big players don’t want, since if implemented it would probably bring home prices in many areas down as much as 60%, bring the DOW to about 4000, and absolutely fuck up the borrow-and-spend gravytrain we call the American Way of Life.

    The market will definitely win this battle, but the big players and their many allies in government (both left and right, but Obama’s the Big Cheese and wins the attention and the blame) are going to go kicking and screaming and spending all the way to fiscal sanity. Expect this to be about a six-year process as both the amount of grotesque spending and the crisis are both exaggerated even though they’re both immense and serious issues.

    March 7, 2009 - 7:09 pm   Link to this Comment
  3. 3. jon

    Also, the actual question of who owns these mortgages is one that is going to be the biggest banking/government records clusterfuck in the history of paperwork mismanagement. There are going to be a lot of people who will find that their mortgages, if they just don’t pay them, will not be asked for. Some have already figured this out and are living for free, though they will have a hell of a time selling their home if and when someone finds the paperwork.

    These are going to be some interesting times ahead.

    March 7, 2009 - 7:13 pm   Link to this Comment