John McCain v. Barack Obama: Housing Market Crisis (Part 1)
With the housing market crisis continuing in prominence as an economic issue, many are wondering what the presidential candidates will do about it. Today is the first of two posts dealing with what the presumed presidential candidates plan to do about the housing market crisis.
Today we will look at what John McCain plans to do to help homeowners in danger of foreclosure, and tomorrow we will look at what Barack Obama proposes.
John McCain and the housing market crisis
Neither of the candidates has a very defined plan for limiting the effects of the housing market crisis on homeowners. But John McCain does have some ideas. Initially, he opposed the idea of government help during the housing market crisis, but he has since come around. Here are some of his proposed efforts:
- Allow the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to back home loans that are re-done to be more affordable for borrowers (and homeowners).
- The “HOME Plan“, combining different proposals from Democrats in Congress with ideas from the Bush Administration. The basic idea is to allow the FHA to gain equity in a home in danger, so that when the house was sold, some of the money goes to the FHA, while the other part goes to the lender.
- Wants to create a task force in the Department of Justice to look into possible crimes related to mortgage backed securities and predatory lending and other practices.
Overall, John McCain appears to be taking a measured approach to the housing market crisis. The idea of having the government get something back so that it is not a complete bailout is fairly appealing.
I also like the idea of investigation into the practices that led up to this mess. There is plenty of blame to go around, but some of the practices might have been highly unethical and may even warrant being made illegal. And one always hopes that by looking closely at the mistakes made, we will actually learn something from them — and avoid them in the future.
What do you think of the John McCain approach to the housing market crisis?
Tags: homeowners, FHA loans, home mortgage loan, John McCain,
John McCain housing, housing market crisis, mortgage loan blog
June 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
[…] we took a look at what John McCain would do about the housing market crisis if elected. Today, we will have a brief overview of what Barack Obama plans in terms of helping […]