Affordable Housing Institute : US

Set a thief to catch a thief, runs the saying, but what do you do when all the thieves are still in business?
 

Find a brain surgeon?
 
That’s the challenge facing Treasury, which, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, has discovered that, because complex financial restructuring is no business for amateurs, the processing bottleneck isn’t the […]

Tim Geithner, President-Elect Barack Obama’s selection for the next Treasury Secretary, is the right man for the job. 
 

But for the honor, I’d just as soon walk
 
Actually, unless one wanted to follow President Bush’s suggestion – an AHI exclusive – of leaving Hank Paulson in place, Mr. Geithner is about the only man who can assure […]

You can’t boom an economy without breaking vases?
 
If capital is global – and it is – then, in the words of a Miami Vice villain, “When we sneeze?  Everybody — catches cold,” and no other nation has more invested, financially and otherwise, in the US economy’s health, than China.  And, if Forbes [September] is to […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

In yesterday’s post, exploring the US’s banking history via a well-reasoned and opinionated Wall Street Journal op-ed by banking historian and essayist/ fulminator John Steele Gordon, we had reached the stage of circling liquidity injections and confidence injections as essential responses to financial crises. 
 

Hold still for the liquidity and confidence
 
It’s […]

Chaos ensues when an enterprise’s span of activity is greater than the span of judicial or regulatory consistency.  That, at least, is the plausible hypothesis behind the emergence of the FBI, brought into being to chase Bonnie and Clyde across state lines; and Interpol, created to pursue criminals throughout Europe. 

Eliot Ness, 1929: you need a […]