Eideard

The Obama administration’s much-anticipated report on redesigning the government’s role in housing finance, published Friday, is not solely a proposal to dissolve the unpopular finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It is also a more audacious call for the federal government to cut back its broadly popular, long-running campaign to help Americans own homes. The three ideas that the report outlines for replacing Fannie and Freddie all would raise the cost of mortgage loans and push homeownership beyond the reach of some families.

That fact is already generating opposition in Congress and among groups like community banks and consumer advocates.

But administration officials said they had concluded the country could no longer afford to sustain its commitment to minting homeowners. Better to help some people rent…

Which was the conclusion Clinton should have considered IMHO instead of lowering the bar, diminishing due diligence in mortgage loan requirements. Couple that with Republican deregulation, removal of oversight in combination with their bubbas on Wall Street designing mythical investment instruments for private trades – and you’re looking at the roots of the Great Recession.

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I think he’d also rather be out of the spotlight more often
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner doesn’t like the fact that he’s so often associated with being a creature of Wall Street when nearly his whole career has been in public service.

In an interview on CNN’s “GPS” program on Sunday, Geithner responded sharply when asked how he felt about being portrayed as “somehow in bed with Wall Street firms” while he spearheads the Obama administration’s financial reform efforts.

“It is part of a narrative that hardened, which is that people came to view the judgments we were making through the prism of a myth,” Geithner said, adding it was untrue that he had a background that left him beholden to industry.

“So I think it’s actually very damaging,” he said. “It’s completely false, of course, and it, you know, should have been corrected a long time ago…”

Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank before being nominated by President Barack Obama to head Treasury and that is about as close as he came to Wall Street.

He joked that he has never had “a real job” in the private sector.

“You know, basically, almost right out of graduate school, I came and worked as a very junior public servant at the Treasury, and spent my entire professional life since in some form of, you know, policy job,” Geithner said.

Most Americans have little or no understanding of the general role of the Federal Reserve. But, then, most Americans have little or no understanding of history and politics, either.

I’ve been as aware – all my life – of how unproductive a task it is to explain to the public at large the realities of history, nature, science, economics, etc..