When, during the Democratic debate in Vegas Tuesday night Hillary proposed her intention to freeze interest rates for five years, my comment was, “That is recklessly stupid.”
I didn’t put enough thought into it to analyze what made it so stupid. It was just gut knowledge, some basic but probably forgotten understanding of what makes financial markets work, and what breaks them. This morning I am pleased to discover that Fortune Magazine agrees.
Hillary’s modest proposal (to wreck the housing market)
The current mortgage mess requires a more intelligent approach than the buzzsaw plan floated by Hillary Clinton.
By Jon Birger, senior writer
(Fortune) — Hillary Clinton is no dummy. Even her detractors know that. And yet in last night’s Democratic presidential debate in Nevada, Clinton floated what is perhaps the dumbest solution to the current mortgage mess I’ve heard from a top presidential contender.
Back in the early Eighties I was selling Real Estate in NY. Mortgage interest rates were an insane 16 - 18% even up to 21% for commerical property, the good ones were adjustable in 5 years, the not so good - in as little as one year. The worst of them came with “balloons”, a clause that means after a preset period of time the bank would call the loan. These we could catagorize into bad and worse, bad being a 5 year balloon, worse being a 1 year balloon.
There was no government freeze, yet as anyone who was fortunate enough to own a home in the mid-eighties knows, rates came down - way, way down - and market values soared. People who were able to survive the hard times were rewarded with huge appreciation. continue reading this entry »
If I heard Hillary use the phrase “from day one” once more, something might have snapped in my id. I mean some bad mojo. I just could not stand to hear it again. Now, Obama, with one snappy come back has robbed her of the use of that slogan!