Hope Now (for lenders, too)

The only "bailout" that I could ever support is refinancing the WHOLE amount owed at market rates to get people out of variable rate mortgages. Any forgiveness of debts should cause the owner to lose their homes. As unfortunate as that is, if they cannot afford the market rate 30 year fixed mortgage, they should not have qualified for the home in the first place.

This seems outrageous to me. I'm not sure that I agree with your assertion that bailing out the mortgage and banking industry is preferable to the situation with the guy in Georgia (that scenario would be fairer to taxpayers anyway).

Too me it's unconscionable that B of A should be pushing for this. Take a look at their financial profile on yahoo:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BAC

It looks to me like they have very healthy earnings, and their stock price is up quite a bit since the beginning of the housing bubble. Is this a company that needs government assistance? The fact that a lot of these proposals are being backed by congressmen like John Kerry and Barney Frank (who normally try to poise themselves as "crusaders against corporate greed"), makes it seem all the more hypocritical.

A classic example of corporate welfare. BOA in particular is trying to enhance the value of its Countrywide acquisition by dumping all of the CW toxic loans on the government and keeping the good loans (ie, profitable) for itself.

Perhaps as a protest, maybe it is time for me to find a new bank.....

A better use of government time and dollars would be to step up criminal investigations of mortgage fraud in the past 3 or 4 years. Countrywide would be a good place to start.

Why wouldn't the goverment bail out these loan companies, after all it's for another Bush.Remember the S&L's, Papa George bailed them out to save his son's. They were in it up to their necks.Remember Keating and his backer McCain? It has always been the middle class or low income in this country who have paid the price of the dishonesty of the rich or big business. And now we are looking at yet another mess aided and abetted by our goverment.

In the 1930's the federal govt. created the Home Owners Loan Corp. wich purchased nonperfomring loans from lenders and gave homeowners replacement loans they could handle. But that was 75 years ago when the American government was not completey bought and paid for by corporations, and there was still an ethic of good corporate citizenship. The mentality in those days was: businesses should be good citizens. If something goes wrong that's not the the result of corporate misconduct, the govt. will step in and help.

Part of me favors a govt intervention now to help homeowners particularly and the economy more generally. But...

It's not JUST that the Republicans have spent the last 30 years stealing from the middle class and poor to enrich a small elite class of insiders that galls me. It's that they claim, with a straight face, that they simply obey the laws of good healthy capitalistic competition, of "creative destruction," of economic Darwinism, when the truth is that it's because the corporate and Wall Street elite in this country have cheated and stolen their way to wealth by buying the Republican -and most of the Democratic - party and turned the federal government into a private subsidiary. They are well-groomed boarding school graduate thieves and cheats, nothing
more. I think their blueblooded grandparents would be ashamed of them.

Chrylser goes own: it goes hat in hand to the govt. after fighting all attempts at fuel efficiency and consumer safety regulation. S&L looting (Thanks president Regan, for the deregulation paving the way) : the once mighty Harvard Business School private market capitalists look to the govt. to bail them AND keep them out of jail. Mortgage fraud scandal: exactly same thing. First it's Don't regulate us, that's un-Amercian. Trust us, we know what we're doing. Now it's please don't send us to jail, and please bail us out, so we can keep sending our kids to elite schools and keep our sumer homes.

Nader has it right: There is no functional or substantive difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. As Chevrolet and Oldsmobile are simply two nominally different divisions of the same corporation, the national parties are nominally different subsidiaries of Wall Street. In th US, democracy works in the service of capitalism, not the other way around.

FORCE the mortgage lenders to rewrite loans (1)reflective of fair market value. (2) at current fixed interest rates. In a pure market economy - which is what Wall Street says is the only way to go - that's what would happen. If Wall Street doesn''t now want to put it's money where it's mouth is - MAKE IT.

A direct transfer payment from your paycheck, your 401(k), your bank account, your gas money into the pockets of the exact same Wall Street crooks who awarded themselves a $33 billion bonus just two months ago.

As the Times article noted, the idea is to pass it off as help for homeowners and try to hide the fact that the super-rich are the only beneficiaries of this massive welfare payment.

I'm glad you posted this, but with local Congressman Barney Frank on the financial services committee, the Globe needs to do a lot more to get this story before the public eye.

Sources inside the Massachusetts Association of Realtors report to PaperEconomy.com that tomorrows monthly report will show that single family home sales crashed 27.7% on a year-over-year basis in January while condo sales collapsed 33.7%.

Further, the single family median selling price declined 5.6% on a year-over-year basis to $321,000 while condo median prices increased 3.5% to $277,500.

After two years of declining home sales, weakening home prices and now looming recession it appears that Massachusetts may have just entered the price “free-fall” phase of the housing decline where home prices continuously drop even through the spring months which are typically strong in the region.

Stay tuned as tomorrow the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index results will be available for Boston likely showing the most significant decline in the last 12 months.