{"id":193761,"date":"2008-11-19T06:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/19\/sometimes-good-legislation-comes-back-too\/"},"modified":"2008-11-19T06:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T11:07:00","slug":"sometimes-good-legislation-comes-back-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/19\/sometimes-good-legislation-comes-back-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes, Good Legislation Comes Back Too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this case, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.housingwire.com\/2008\/11\/18\/mortgage-cram-down-legislation-resurfaces\/\">a change to bankruptcy laws that would allow judges to modify mortgages on primary residences<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Right now it can be done on a vacation home, recreational boat, etc., but not on a primary residence, but Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is bringing back a change in bankruptcy law to change this.<\/p>\n<p>According to reports, this will be a priority of Obama, but we are hearing that about a lot of things right now.<\/p>\n<p>This is a very good law for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Modifying mortgages is cheaper than foreclosure.<\/li>\n<li>With mortgages sliced and diced 6 ways from Sunday, it is currently impossible to get consent from the holders of the mortgages to renegotiate the loans.<\/li>\n<li>It punishes the players who created the bubble.<\/li>\n<li>The cost to people taking out mortgages is minuscule, on the order of 25-75 basis points (\u00bc-\u00be%), which should not make a significant difference in home affordability.<\/li>\n<li>It makes the use of arcane financial instruments on home mortgages less certain, and hence less likely.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this case, a change to bankruptcy laws that would allow judges to modify mortgages on primary residences. Right now it can be done on a vacation home, recreational boat, etc., but not on a primary residence, but Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is bringing back a change in bankruptcy law to change this. According to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1004,1020,1088],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-finance","category-legislation","category-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193761"}],"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=193761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}