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 […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 2 and Part 1.]
 
The previous two parts of this post introduced us to Howard Husock’s argument in City Journal, recapitulating themes he’s sounded over years and years, that the Community Reinvestment Act is the worm in capitalism’s apple that sucked banks into making bad loans.
 

CRA?
 
It’s particularly tough because the CRA’s had gone three […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 

Yesterday’s post introduced us to the seductive argument, advanced by Howard Husock in City Journal and enthusiastically embraced by a wide range of affordable-housing foes, that the Community Reinvestment Act is the primum mobile of our current financial mess.
 
Which, when you think of it, is a tough claim to make for a […]

It’s becoming fashionable, among policy journalists (and even certain ex-CEOs of Fannie Mae) to suggest that the devil made them do it, that somehow pressure to extend affordability overrode all their instinctive prudence and led them down the primrose path to America’s financial ruin.  Don’t blame me, runs the refrain, blame the Community Reinvestment Act […]