The fact that so many people are in foreclosure is a national tragedy. In the future, we should build mortgages with built-in workouts [mortgages that allow greater flexibility to avoid foreclosure by adjusting payments when the borrower is experiencing financial hardship]. Our failure to do workouts this time was a colossal error. We should be thinking about other kinds of mortgages that are not so vulnerable to this kind of crisis.
We created a situation that caused a recession that wiped out the net worth of about 15 million households. That’s a mistake. Many of these people have virtually no other savings. So there was something wrong with the system...
I still stand by the view that there’s more than a 50% chance we’ll slip back into a recession before we recover from this one -- before unemployment is back down to a normal level. I don’t know that it will be in 2011. I just think that the unemployment rate is going to stay high for a long time, and recessions come with some regularity. The economy is not looking particularly strong now, so it could come soon.
---Source:Kiplinger [My Emphasis]
No comments:
Post a Comment