Free Republic

<p>President Bush emerged from a meeting with foreign financial officials on Saturday and pledged a global response to the credit crisis that will lead toward a "path of stability and long-term growth."</p> <p>"The United States has a special role to play in leading the response to this crisis," the president said. "That is why I convened this morning's meeting here at the White House and it is why our government will continue using all the tools at our disposal to resolve this crisis."</p>

What’s a principled conservative to think of the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion authority to allow the U.S. Treasury buy illiquid securities? On the one hand it would appear to be a necessary step to solve a systemic crisis in the U.S. banking system. On the other, it promises to be an enormous expansion of government power and commitment of taxpayer dollars. To arrive at a principled view on this intervention, we must answer three critical questions: Is it necessary? Will it work? And even then, is it morally justifiable? Unfortunately, we are thwarted at the outset. There’s simply no...

PHOENIX - That empty foreclosed home down the street today could be a haven for immigrant smugglers tomorrow. A comparison of data on foreclosures and properties known as drophouses in the Phoenix metropolitan area shows that wherever homeowners are in financial distress, ‘‘coyotes’’ are probably lurking. The smugglers use rental homes known as drophouses to stash illegal immigrants long enough for payments to arrive, then release them to go on their way. The largest concentrations of Phoenix-area drophouses are in the same neighborhoods that have the largest share of foreclosures, the data shows. In addition, of the 41 Phoenix-area drophouses...

Two former managers at investment bank Bear Stearns have been arrested in New York over the collapse of the bank's hedge fund last year. Reports say Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin will face charges in connection with their management of hedge funds that collapsed in June 2007. The bank's hedge funds bet on the high-risk sub-prime mortgage market in the US before it collapsed. Authorities in Brooklyn are due to give details about the case later. FBI spokesman Jim Margolis told the BBC the men faced criminal charges of "securities fraud related to their management of two Bear Stearns hedge...

On Tuesday, Barack Obama faced the glare of the cameras and tried to deal with what was rapidly becoming one of those "distractions" he so despises. It turns out that the man he chose to head up the steering committee to help him choose a vice president, Jim Johnson, had a past that was making Obama out to be a hypocrite on the sub-prime mortgage crisis. After Obama skewered John McCain for his connections with sub-prime lenders, it appears that Mr. Johnson made McCain's connections look positively innocent by comparison. Johnson, Fannie Mae chief from 1991 through 1998, received more...

If you're going to promise "new politics," it would probably be wise to eschew the same old Beltway cronies and insiders who have served presidential nominees of yore. And if you're going to attack political opponents for playing "textbook Washington games," it would probably be best not to play them yourself. If you do, you'll end up tongue-tied in front of the cameras, hung by your own holier-than-thou rhetoric and faced once again with the decision to throw another bad choice under the bus. Yes, Barack Obama, we're talking about you. Again. It's getting mighty crowded under that bus, isn't...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barack Obama is considering former top military leaders among his possible running mates, according to a senator who met Tuesday with the Democratic presidential candidate's vice presidential vetting team. North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad told The Associated Press said the team asked him about potential candidates from three broad categories _ current top elected officials, former top elected officials and former top military leaders. Conrad would not disclose which names they discussed, and the Obama campaign has been keeping the process a closely guarded secret. "We talked about many names," Conrad said, including "some that are out...

Most Americans live within their means and pay their mortgages on time, but some people took risky mortgages, betting that the price of homes would continue to rise. That bet isn’t paying off for some, and now Congress wants to give out $300 billion in new taxpayer loans to some of the riskiest borrowers with the worst credit. The median home price in Kentucky is just $111,000, yet the bailout promises taxpayer loan sizes of over $500,000. The bailout bill will serve as a transfer of money and risk from Kentucky taxpayers to housing speculators in San Francisco, Las Vegas,...

"What is mysterious, what is mysterious about the phrase 'variable rate'?" --George Will, This Week, March 30, 2008 Mystery is in the eyes of the borrower--and the MSM. The term "variable rate" in a mortgage might seem straightforward enough to George Will and our erudite NB readers, but to a college-educated homeowner--and ABC's Kate Snow--it's apparently a real brain twister. Snow hosted a segment on this morning's GMA dedicated to determining how the various presidential candidates' proposals would address the problems of sub-prime borrowers. As is the MSM's wont, ABC focused on a single sympathetic case, that of the Cruz-Rivera...

All we hear these days is whining from reckless home borrowers and their banks. But did you know that renters are 32 percent of American households? And that homes in foreclosure are less than 2 percent? So why is Congress rushing to bailout high-flying borrowers and their lenders with our tax dollars? Unfortunately, renters aren't as good at politics as the small minority of homeowners (and their bankers) who are in trouble. We don't have lobbyists in Washington, DC. We don't get a tax deduction for our rent and we don't get sweetheart government loans. Quite simply, we are just...

The real estate auction business is booming. Real Estate Disposition Corp is auctioning 2,000 homes in California and 575 in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. More states are coming up.

To: Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Christopher Dodd, Senator Charles Schumer and members of Congress Please do not support the efforts to bail out mortgage holders and mortgage lenders with my tax dollars. As a responsible citizen, I do not believe it is right for you to ask me to pay for other peoples’ financial excesses, especially since a bailout encourages lenders to continue making predatory loans, with the assumption that taxpayers are on the hook. Further, we believe that the liability of the mortgage mess should NOT be shifted to GSE’s Freddie and Fannie. I appreciate the goal of helping...

Embarrassed presidential hopeful John Edwards promised yesterday to take millions of dollars of his own fortune out of a hedge fund tied to subprime lenders who foreclosed on victims of Hurricane Katrina. The populist candidate - who has denounced such lenders - invested $16 million of his $30 million in assets in Fortress Investment Group. The Wall Street Journal reported that 34 New Orleans homeowners struggling to overcome Katrina's aftermath faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress. Yesterday, the red-faced Democratic candidate vowed to remove from his portfolio any Fortress funds that have a stake in those lender units....

Sales of existing homes plunged in March by the largest amount in nearly two decades, reflecting bad weather and increasing problems in the subprime mortgage market, a real estate trade group reported Tuesday. The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes fell by 8.4 percent in March, compared to February. It was the biggest one-month decline since a 12.6 percent plunge in January 1989, another period of recession conditions in housing. The fall in sales in March was bigger than had been expected and it dashed hopes that housing was beginning to mount a recovery after last...