The Housing Boom

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Economist Thomas Sowell appeared on Dennis Prager’s radio show May 27:

Tom: If the results weren’t so serious, all this would make a great Gilbert & Sullivan musical, with all the mutually contradictory statements by the politicians…

Dennis: The president said the other day that we don’t have any money.

Tom: What that means is that they are going to have to print some…and that means inflation.

The deficit run up by this administration will exceed the deficits run up by all other administrations.

Dennis: I don’t know what it would take to awaken the American people.

Tom: I have a terrible feeling that it will take an American city in radioactive ruins to wake up some of them.

Dennis: Was the housing boom artificial?

Tom: Yes, in two senses. It started off as a great political crusade for affordable housing. Now, most of the housing across most of the United States was more affordable than it had been ten years earlier or twenty years earlier, but in some particular places, particularly coastal California, the housing was so expensive that people were paying half their family income just to put a roof over their heads. But the politicians tried to turn this into a national problem so that they could have a federal program. So they started leaning on banks to start making loans to people they wouldn’t make loans to otherwise and who couldn’t meet the standards, and similar pressure was put on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who were assigned quotas of how many mortgages they bought had to be for low and moderate income people…

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About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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