Aside from the scalding melodrama of the headline, I found this to be a pretty interesting piece:
Fiscal Times: This Rule Could Kill the Housing Market
The gist of the article centers on a chunk of the recently-enacted Dodd-Frank legislation — a chunk which contains the onerous requirement that lenders must maintain on their balance sheets some share of the risk of mortgages they sell off to investors.
Oh, the horror. Mortgage lenders retaining a sliver of the mortgage risk they create? Dear Lord, what legislative insanity will we birth next?
No, really. While I tend to come down against Big Government most of the time, given what happened in 2008 and 2009, I’m pretty content with mortgage lenders being required to balance-sheet some risk from the mortgages they create. To me, this sounds like a burden our esteemed megabanks worked exceptionally hard to earn during those heady years of the mid-2000s.
But get a load of this choice bit of idiocy:
Even frequent critics of lender practices, such as the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and the National Consumer Law Center, have joined bankers and bank lobbyists in calling for regulators to rethink the rule.
“The proposal as introduced will literally erase a decade of accomplishment in defining what is a responsible loan,” said David Berenbaum, chief program officer with the Coalition, an advocacy group for community organizations that support affordable housing and equal access to credit. “It is going to narrow the range of loans that lenders are willing to originate to the point that only consumers with the best credit scores—meaning white and affluent consumers—are going to get loans.”
Say what? A “decade of accomplishment in defining what is a responsible loan?” Can this guy be serious? Or is his definition of “accomplishment” just far, far different from mine?
I’m thinking it’s the latter.
