Housing Bill Passes - Will It Help Home Owners?
The House has passed the Housing Bill after Bush says he will now sign it.
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From The New York Times…
But the legislation, much of which has been debated and fretted over on Capitol Hill for months, also leaves numerous questions unanswered. The biggest unknown is whether the measure will be adequate to slow the downward spiral of home prices and help the economy recover from what many analysts now expect to be a prolonged slowdown.
Perhaps most significantly, the legislation hardens the government’s long-implicit assurance that it would step in to rescue the two mortgage giants who together own or guarantee about $5.2 trillion of the nation’s $12 trillion in mortgages. Currently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee financing for about 80 percent of new mortgages.
To accommodate a potential rescue for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bill raises the national debt limit to $10.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion.
From Tami Winfrey Harris at The Political Voices of Women…
What Your President Says When He Thinks You’re Not Listening.
Of course we knew this all along. When President George W. Bush is with his cronies behind closed doors and the cameras are (supposedly) turned off, sometimes he lets a little truth slip out.
Greg Mitchell of The Huffington Post reports that Houston’s ABC affiliate has produced embarrassing footage of Bush at a local fund-raiser for Pete Olson, blaming Wall Street for “getting drunk” and screwing up the American economy.
In footage obtained by reporter Maya Shay, a smirking Bush says…
From the Politisite…
The U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed the long-awaited housing rescue bill (H.R. 3221) sending it now for a last Senate approval before President Bush can sign it into law.
From The Back Story…
There has been a lot of wrangling over this bill. Until today, the president has been threatening a veto over $3.9 billion in grants to local governments to buy up abandoned houses. The president called that a bailout.
But included in the bill are guarantees to back housing mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and those guarantees sure look like bailouts as well. I’m not referring to the loan guarantees. I’m talking about the government’s promise to use tax dollars to buy Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae stock, in the event that their stock prices tumble.
What do you think about the Housing Bill? Will it help the average homeowner?
