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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (562792)	6/16/2010 10:49:58 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1577030

"...Washington is full of monitors-cubicle-bound bureaucrats at the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Management and Budget-who spend their days writing reports even their bosses won't read. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is a regular on Dr. Phil. She has taken a potentially dreary job-explaining the complexities of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and turned it into a platform for sexy media appearances on The Daily Show, Squawkbox, and NPR. She cultivates the image of a scholar-sensible hair, collared shirts, utilitarian glasses-and uses it to establish herself as resident star professor, working hard for You. The unifying theme of Warren's popular work is the "collapse of the middle class," and she is capable of casting nearly any economic indicator in support of her core thesis. The entry of married women into the workforce massively increased household incomes, and would seem to therefore increase economic stability. Warren argues that it left families more insecure because they now lack an "extra" worker who could, in theory, fill the gap if dad's hours were cut or he fell ill. The fact that clothes, food, and appliances have gotten far less expensive, and therefore eat up smaller percentage of any given families budget, would seem to be good news. But Warren sees only more insecurity; families could once salvage their budgets in tough times by making relatively painless cuts in these expenditures. Cutting back on clothes and food won't help much anymore, because so little of the total budget is devoted to such things. Warren's rhetoric-"And then it happened," is a favored locution, closely followed by "nobody's safe"- betrays a fear for the stability of a certain kind of traditional American household. It's not a poor household; one could easily finish The Two Income Trap and come away with the idea that the poor are making out like bandits in terms of social welfare and news coverage, while the middle class suffer, un-helped and ignored. It's not necessarily a progressive household, either; Warren derides left feminists in the same book, and laments the pressure women feel to work in order to render their families financially competitive. Nor is she above stretching the numbers to suit an agenda; she has famously claimed that 50 percent of all bankruptcies are caused by medical debt, a number that involves absurdly generous definitions of "medical" and "caused."..." doublex.com

To: tejek who wrote (562792)	8/26/2010 10:57:43 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577030

No Such Thing as a Simple Mortgage Aug 3 2010, 3:31 PM ET \| Comment So the McArdle-Suderman household are about to become householders. We're in the process of buying our own little 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath slice of heaven. Actually going through the mortgage process is a reminder of one of the reasons that things went so badly wrong during the housing bubble; we are inundated with paper. There are disclosures about the Mortgage Disclosure Improvement Act telling us we have seven days to review any change in our APR; disclosures about the Home Valuation Code of Conduct, even a disclosure solemnly informing us that the bank intends to check credit scores and may not loan us money if there's a bad payment history of too much debt. I'm pretty good with paperwork, and I understand all the terms being used (not to mention the laws being referenced), and I find it impossible to keep track of it all mentally--especially when you add in the tax returns, the W-2s, the bank statments and sworn certifications that all the money being used was legitimately earned or received as gifts. In fairness, we're going through our credit union, which is apparently especially bureaucratic, but still--it's very easy to develop a sort of attentional blindness and keep signing things. I requires heroic effort to read every document. This illustrates, I think, the limits of transparency. Much of this paperwork is the product of earlier acts designed to help uninformed borrowers deal with the complexity of their loans. If you read and understand all of it, perhaps you do. But there's so much of it that it's relatively easier to overlook something. You could simplify offerings--outlaw anything faintly exotic. Negative amortization loans, of course, and anything with a balloon payment--but many people got caught out by more ordinary ARMs, so maybe those should go too. The less martial version of this thought is embodied in the "plain vanilla" default option that Elizabeth Warren, among others, has been pushing. But you quickly start harming more sophisticated homebuyers, or those with odd situations, in order to help the naive. A relative with guaranteed consulting income on a multi-year contract, for example, had a hell of a time getting a mortgage, because he hadn't already been enjoying that income for the requisite number of years. That is the situation that the "no-doc" loan was designed to deal with, but the abuse by the unscrupulous has forced him to jump through many more hoops. Or take the Mortgage Disclosure Improvement Act. My bank offers something called "freedom lock" which allows you to reset your rate lock if rates fall. However, thanks to the MDIA, you must lock seven days before closing, because you can't do anything to the mortgage that changes the APR without giving the buyer seven days to review. Now, I don't really need seven days to calculate my APR, but I can't waive the provision, because otherwise, the naive would be too easily taken advantage of. So if rates fall next week, I'll be stuck with a higher payment. I don't know that we're striking the wrong balance; I don't need a quarter point lower rate so badly that we should expose millions of unsophisticated homebuyers to danger of being cheated. What worries me is that there's little recognition that we have to strike a balance--or for that matter, even that there are tradeoffs. Everything that ever disadvantaged someone is automatically assumed to be a terrible product feature that ought to be eliminated. That instinct is what most worries me about the new CFPA. theatlantic.com nevertaken 3 weeks ago "I don't need a quarter point lower rate so badly that we should expose millions of unsophisticated homebuyers to danger of being cheated." Heh. Wait until you start making those payments every month. Then multiply that by everyone who closes a home sale within 7 days of an interest rate reduction. Why could there not be a non-waiver exemption for any home buyer who is advised by a lawyer? theatlantic.com