MIR: July
[Previous months in review available here: Jun, May, Apr, Mar, Feb, Jan-06, Dec-05.]
July opened with the last two installments of my mammoth illumination of OFHEO’s unrebutted story of the Fannie Mae scandal:
The Fannie Mae tangram in seven parts
Part 7: Why should taxpayers care?
The five parts posted in June were:
Part 1: Summary and introduction
Part 2: Maximizing executive bonuses
Part 3: Gaming the bonus formula
Part 4: Turbocharging the balance sheet
Part 5: Smoothing earnings with financial tricks
I finished with:
Over the years, I’ve known many fine people who worked at or joined Fannie Mae. As these scandals come out, one after another, seemingly without end, what must they be thinking, even if loyalty and prudence silence their voices?
If little faults, proceeding on distemper,
Shall not be wink’d at, how shall we stretch our eye
When capital crimes, chew’d, swallow’d and digested,
Appear before us?
Had I worked at Fannie Mae in this interval, I would now be furious. All the good Fannie Mae has done, and it is considerable, is now stained by the shenanigans done in the executive suite. Were I a Fannie Mae employee, I would feel personally betrayed by my former leadership.
July gave me time to lay out some longer, more theoretical pieces. I spent two posts looking perplexedly at some fascinating data about the changing income distribution within cities, in Granularizing neighborhoods, Part 1 and Part 2, and laid out seven reasons why housing tax credits work,
Count them on the fingers of a polydactyl hand!
In a follow-on story to my two-part December post on the World Bank’s predicament on the
White or black? Depends on how you look at it.
and I was similarly hopeful in speculating on the links among The World Cup, the world’s future, and affordable housing.
In summer a young householder lightly thinks of vacation, either O for a house in the country or just a pied-a-veekend.
After having a little fun with a small tenure alternative in The cookie cutter house: Part 1 and Part 2 (which reviewed past efforts such as the Sears House, Lustron House, and Operation Breakthrough), I examined the decidedly mixed report card of New New Orleans:
Some neighborhoods are Worse than condemned, some are Cracking the shell of redevelopment, and for nearly all, the sudden infusion of Federal money means Start your economic engines: Part 1, whose Part 2 followed in August, finishing with:
Will the money produce good or ill? And which model will work better,
“Our participation, the federal money, is just a catalyst,” said Nelson R. Bregon, general deputy assistant secretary of the federal housing agency. “At the end of the day, we foresee the private sector stepping in.”
As the Black Sox demonstrated, if you wave money, they will come.
Meanwhile, despite the summer holidays, eminent domain was in the news, in New London where Kelo began and where it is now Ending in farce; in New Jersey, where some of Kelo’s fellows are doing well by doing good; and in California, which is considering an awful piece of legislation whose flaws we spot in Eminent domain reform: spot the joker! Part 1 and Part 2, with this money (literally!) quote speculating that the measure’s real purpose is reining in the legislature by enacting something so horrible they will be forced to avert it:
Perhaps this is the proponents’ real objective, and one of the effective political uses of referendum (ever since the incredibly popular and incredibly distorting and damaging Proposition 13). Ride a wave of public sentiment to the passage of sweeping (if flawed) legislation as a means of forcing the legislature, in self-defense, to enact the rational legislation that for one reason or another it has previously ducked.
You voters tried to make me do something, but I ducked!
In any case, for the sake of
As the
Doesn’t vector that way often
Compared with other asset classes, single-family homes are remarkably resistant to price collapses; while every now and then prices may scoot up, they very seldom reverse course with anything like the same speed. (I can’t prove this but am utterly convinced it’s true, for five reasons: read the whole thing.)
Be it ever so humble, a man’s home is his castle. Homesteader,
Gotta write more blog posts!
