Bush (and any of his Congressional assistants) should not be allowed to stand in the way of significant progress.

Now sidetrack to the mortgage biz:
If you want to fleece people, think of their biggest payment. It’s rent or mortgage.
So if you could figure out a way to get a good slice of the mortgage market, you’d be richer than Midas.
And it doesn’t take much to make a ton of money, especially as home prices rise: even a 1/4 percent of a $350,000 home is a lot more money than a quarter point on an $80,000 home.
And if you’re the bank/mortgage company, you get that money month in, month out. But you sell those loans to Wall Street, who sells them to… whoever.

One realtor friend spotted a client about to sign a mortgage with Countrywide. Their interest rate was calculated using a credit rating for the couple that was less favorable than they should have received; the Countrywide calculation put them in a mortgage $1,000/month higher than they should have received.
So Countrywide stood to make $12,000/year — free and clear — of one single couple.
Multiply that over 100 families, then over 100,000 families and you start to see how fast the money adds up.

Then realize that realtors in the US basically have zero requirements for entry. You pay a fee, you buy biz cards, and that’s about it in many places. So these are not necessarily ‘experts’ — and many of them don’t actually understand mortgages.
(FWIW: about 20-30% of realtors sell 70 – 80% of the properties.
Therefore, some realtors actually don’t understand the garbage they’re having people sign.

Ditto some banks and mortgage jobs. There really are no ‘barriers’ to entry; you can show up sober on time, be pleasant, learn the job, and that’s enough to get anyone started — at least, according to my good realtor contacts.

Shorter: huge opportunities to make tons of money in very ‘legal’ ways, combined with a workforce that may not really understand the implications of their jobs (anyone smart moves up pretty fast, as near as I can tell).

Then add on the fact that the people who assess homes for the banks are in a tough spot — they need to justify the selling prices, and in many cases even if they personally feel the house isn’t worth $280,000, they’re in a tough spot. If they say, ‘the house is only worth $220,000′, they encounter:

1. A pissed off realtor who is working strictly on commission — that commission is based on the sales price, so the higher the sales price the higher their income.

2. A pissed off mortgage lender (who happens to be paying the assessor to come in with the approved-of price of $280,000 the seller has agreed to pay). Like the realtor, at least a portion of the mortgage lender’s income is a function of the sale price.

3. Basically, you’ve created food chains based on sales price, and at every stage in that network all players are advantaged by rising prices.

4. The Internet, which allows people outside the US to examine, bid on, and purchase properties inside the US, thereby squeezing the housing supply in specific regions and raising prices.

Basically, there are a whole lot of factors driving higher home prices.
With zero accountability for the safety of the community.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, local bankers had a personal, ‘real life’ investment in the health of their communities. This included ensuring that they did not lend to people who could not afford homes — because it was bad for personal relationships and bad for their communities. The old-timer bankers understood the linkages between home ownership, social stability, strong interpersonal relationships, and city budgets.

Those relationships have been broken.
Partly it’s a problem of scale.
Partly it’s a problem of distance — removing money from local communities also meant that the kind of natural feedback systems that kept bankers from being reckless evaporated.

This is a disaster for municipal governments, who need stable populations personally linked to the community, who can afford to pay taxes.

The solutions will require components related to community design (sprawl drives global warming), and also reinforces keeping at least a portion of people’s mortgage money in their local communities, rather than sending it off to the assholes at Bear Stearns.

What the major networks are not reporting, Watch this clip
http://www.juancole.com/

“2 minutes of coverage per network per week” 3 major networks coverage on Iraq

We have had a year and a half of Elections elections elections on the major networks.

As with others who might be leaning, let’s remind him that caving to his leadership and refusing to hear the voices of his voters is not a cost-free exercise.