Barney Frank describes “developing legislation” that appears foolish, unwieldy, and untimely, even by the standards of Washington:

the House Financial Services Committee is developing legislation to limit the damage done by the record number of foreclosures in the past 12 months and to reduce the number going forward…we propose to tell those who either originated or purchased mortgages that are now extremely unlikely to be repaid that they should write down their existing obligations to a level that represents current market value. After — and only after — the loss is taken, the government would facilitate refinancing mortgages for homeowners who could meet repayment obligations at the new, written-down level…these initiatives will help meet three crucial objectives. First, they will allow millions of families to avoid the disaster of losing their homes.

So let’s get this straight. Step one, the bill has to be “developed”; step two, it has to be passed and signed; step three, the actual procedures to implement the bill have to be written; step four, banks have to write down certain mortgages; step five, the government has to determine that the write down was to “current market value”; step six, the government will then “facilitate refinancing” of mortgages, but before that it has to determine which homeowners could “meet repayment obligations” on the new debt.

Question: how is this absurd contraption going to meet its primary objective (to “allow millions of families to avoid the disaster of losing their homes”) when it clearly will take more than a year to implement and the peak in mortgage resets is in the next couple of months?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.