{"id":188653,"date":"2010-08-18T18:16:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-18T23:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/18\/barney-frank-missing-the-lede-on-the-gses\/"},"modified":"2010-08-18T18:16:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T23:16:00","slug":"barney-frank-missing-the-lede-on-the-gses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/18\/barney-frank-missing-the-lede-on-the-gses\/","title":{"rendered":"Barney Frank: Missing the Lede on the GSEs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The headline, of course is that <a href=\"http:\/\/tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com\/2010\/08\/frank-abolish-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac.php\">he is calling for the gradual elimination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>&#8220;I think they should be abolished,&#8221; Frank said. &#8220;The only question is what do you put in their place. This is a situation where given the importance they had come to play in housing, you can&#8217;t tear down the old jail until you build a new one. And that&#8217;s a process that we&#8217;ve started.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is legitimately a big news story, but the rest of his proposal is far more revolutionary.  He is a calling for an end to government subsidies to home buyers:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Frank went on: &#8220;I have been very critical for a long time that not everybody should be a homeowner. There are people in this society who for economic and frankly social reasons can&#8217;t and shouldn&#8217;t be homeowners. I do want some government help to build affordable rental housing.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s this 2<sup>nd<\/sup> point that is a big deal.  While the GSEs (<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">G<\/span>overnment <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">S<\/span>ponsored <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">E<\/span>ntities) were a vanishingly small part of the housing bubble, as house prices exploded, their share of the market fell precipitously, what <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">was<\/span> a huge part of the market was the enormous subsidies made available to both home buyers, sellers, builders, and agents.<\/p>\n<p>This distorted the market in some <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">very<\/span> profound ways, and it is very likely that if these measures had not been in place, we would have seen neither the bubble nor the crash.<\/p>\n<p>We sacrificed our economy on the alter of home ownership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The headline, of course is that he is calling for the gradual elimination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: &#8220;I think they should be abolished,&#8221; Frank said. &#8220;The only question is what do you put in their place. This is a situation where given the importance they had come to play in housing, you can&#8217;t &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1265,1088,985,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-housing-crash","category-real-estate","category-regulation","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}