On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 9:36 AM, David B. Shemano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I stand by my main point -- because we have numerous government policies > that favor real estate investment and home ownership, strange things are > going to occasionally occur.
That's almost a tautology. Of course government policies will distort market outcomes - that is the whole point especially when the market leads to fucked-up outcomes like cutting off availability of credit for credit-worthy minorities because of red-lining etc.. So let us for the sake of argument accept that the CRA may have been one of the contributing factors to the bubble. Without the CRA you might have had a slightly smaller bubble. On the other hand, the CRA also had many beneficial social effects for the poor and minorities. So are you saying the CRA overall was a bad thing? I notice that you are not even addressing the bigger contributors to the crisis like the greed bubble on Wall St and incentive problems associated with paying bonuses based on mark-to-model. Should we not address these bigger problems before the small ones? > Compare to the relatively unsubsidized market -- where is the bubble in > automobiles and automobile loans? They get securitized as well, but no > bubble. I don't think it is a coincidence. > Actually auto-loans are not doing all that great either: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23941174/ -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
