Bloomberg: Obama Lawyers Signal Likely Supreme Court Appeal on Health CareThe White House wants to end the federal appeals court rulings on the president's health care reform, and for the Supreme Court to take up the case. That's likely to bring a decision in June, in the middle of the presidential campaign. "President Barack Obama …
Tag Archives: finance
How we got our mortgage. Or: Why so many people bought houses they couldn’t afford.
Our loan officer was insistent: we’d be nuts not to get an adjustable rate mortgage. It was October of 2007. We’d met with this SunTrust loan officer—I’ll call him “Jim”—a couple of times so far, and we were moving ahead with a construction loan to be rolled into a permanent loan when our new house …
Are Goldman execs arming themselves? (Hint: No.)
Bloomberg claims that Goldman Sachs executives are buying firearms to prepare for a peasant uprising. Major news outlets across the globe are repeating the story uncritically. I call bullshit.
A nation turns to frugality.
I read a pair of articles about the economy today that are surely bad news, but that give me hope in the long run. The New York Times reports that carmakers worry that this is the new normal, that the go-go car sales day of the past 15 years was a bubble. This was the …
Fannie Mae renting out foreclosed homes.
I’m happy to see the news that Fannie Mae will be allowing renters to continue to rent homes that have been foreclosed on. But I think it’ll be better if this is expanded to include renting back owner-occupied homes, too. It seems to me that this is just smart business—I imagine most lenders would be …
This American Bailout.
I have found that I know significantly more than your average joe about the cause of the nation’s financial meltdown. That is wholly attributable to spending one hour listening to “The Giant Pool of Money,” This American Life’s May episode entirely about the topic. I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you listen to …
Biden and bankruptcy.
This bailout bill debate could be really bad for Joe Biden and, by extension, Obama. If talk turns to helping out struggling homeowners, and not just CEOs, it’s only a matter of time until somebody points out that Biden is responsible for their inability to declare bankruptcy.