host

I totally disagree. No one who cannot refinance "on their own", will benefit from this plan. The few with "good credit" who cannot refinance into a loan with more attractive terms as their "time bomb" adjustable rate mortgage, or "no interest" for the first X number of years adjustable rate mortgage RESETS to a higher interest rate, and includes payment of some principle, are unable to refinance because the property that they took a mortgage loan on is worth less than they paid for it.

If they put down a 5 percent or smaller down payment, they have to pay the difference between current appraised value, and closing costs, in order to pay off their current mortgage. If the difference they would have to bring to the closing to qualify is a small amount, and they were credit worthy, they would have refinanced before it became a problem.

I'll post it again. The folks who took out the loans that are now "a problem", were almost all borrowers who, at higher appraised values than the current ones, were stretched to qualify for the high amounts that they borrowed, and now owe.

Housing valuations are not going to be rising until excess inventory, unsold new units still being built by builders not yet bankrupted, along with the finished units languishing and overhanging on the market, along with rising foreclosures and from the people who have the means to keep paying but who are smart enough to "walk away", will pressure prices down.

Added to that are the buildup of sellers who will grow more impatient and concerned as prices continue to drop. That kind of a market triggers a growing, mass realization that residential real estate is an illiquid, unattractive investment, except as a necessity.

Again, anyone who already is "upside down" on their loan vs. valuation....in this, only the morning of a long period of decline, is much better off walking away from their mortgage and property now. They will walk later.

Read the first posts on the <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=113978">1992 redux</a> thread. Read the stock prices mentioned then, look at them now. I know what I am talking about. Read a few thousand posts, over five or six years, on these sites:

http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/sub...ubjectid=51347

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

This guy had been correct for months:
http://search.messages.yahoo.com/sea...thor&within=tm

Here are the prices offered for Mortgage backed bonds:
http://www.markit.com/information/products/abx.html

Here is a description of what E*trade just sold $3 billion of these assets for:

Citicorp is bankrupt, the largest US bank is getting a "bailout" at 11 percent annual interest, form an Abu Dhabi state owned "entity" to put "lipstick on the pig", to delay the FACT that Citicorp is insolvent. The Fed has allowed the four biggest US banks to loan up to 30 percent of their assets to their brokerage subsidiaries, instead of the ten percent limit conditioned by FDIC deposit insurance. They've put that insurance fund at risk by raising the limit:
If you still see this as a "subprime" loan problem, you have a lot of reading to do. I cannot believe you posted so adamantly.

It borders on insulting.

This is a global credit crisis. Major banks do not trust the solvency of each other...even to the extent of lending to each other "over night". It is not that they don't know the "value" of their own SIVS, Derivatives, and MBS, they refuse to accept, or let on that they have accepted, that much of what they hold is near worthless, crap.

This has nothing to do with opinions stated in this thread's OP. The decsions are not "socialistic", they are not intended to provide any benefit to individuals. The US banking system and it's paper currency are "on the brink".

Toronto Dominion bank is facing similar challenges, but your currency is sound. You enjoy a trade surplus, your country exports a million barrels of petroleum per day. We import 14 million bbls of petroleum equivalents per day, at $90 per bbl, all with borrowed money.

Our government along with the Fed, which is a private bank, and the executives of the major financial concerns will screw the entire populace, as the dollar and these corporations "go down". The US is heading into, believe it or not, an economic depression. Anyone paying a mortgage on a house that is worth less than they paid for it, is a debt slave.

Only a dramatic collapse in the exchange rate of the dollar...say 50 percent in the next two years, will aid "upside down" mortgagees enough to matter. The Fed talks about battling inflation while their critical concern is a repeat of what began in 1929, a deflationary depression. In housing, it is here. The fiscal policy is to attempt to inflate, and it is going to fail, unless they work even harder to destroy the dollar's purchasing power.

World demand for everything is beginning a decline. US imports will drop dramatically. This will help to stabilize the dollar, by easing the $840 billion annual trade deficit. The Fed keeps lowering interest rates, dropping the dollars' exchange rate, hurting rates of return for small savers and CD purchasers. They try to make borrowing more attractive to consumers and businesses increasingly unable to qualify for loans, or uninterested in obtaining them.

I hope the above info and this will help put things in perspective for you. Again, there is not justification for this thread's OP: