Bankruptcy is a necessary part of a free market. I certainly believe this to be so. Rick Newman, who writes the blog “Flow Chart” over at U.S. News, is putting forward the provocative idea that failure is exactly what we needed more of in 2008 and what we should want in 2009.

Marshall here. Slowly but surely, the Treasury is beginning to move more aggressively on providing help to homeowners, as opposed to bankers. This makes sense: A financial meltdown and housing deflation cannot be cured simply by pumping money into the banking system. You also have to consider a program which provides mortgage relief to homeowners as well.

The Treasury Department is considering a plan to halt the slide in home prices that would lower mortgage rates using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The plan could reduce rates for newly issued loans to as low as 4.5%. Slowly, but surely, the government is moving in the right direction. It is beginning to dawn on Treasury (albeit, belatedly) that a prerequisite for economic recovery is not just the stabilisation of the banking system, but some sort of program which provides mortgage relief for home owners. This plan is a small start.

I have a problem with this though. It is “trickle down”.

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Below is a chart of variable rate loan applications as per cent of total.
This can be looked at from a contrary opinion point of view, that is people are afraid of variable rate loans after they got burned on the upside in the last several years and thus they are moving to fix rate loans [...]

I don’t understand the lack of imagination in DC. All the politicians have to do is tell the banks to lower their variable rate mortgage loans on the books to 4% right now, today or else and it is like $600-$750 billion of stimulus. With short rates as zero it’s the least the banks can do.

That probably offends the free market sensibilities of many of our readers, so here’s an alternative approach: Why not Fannie and Freddie, which are now de facto arms of the US government?

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When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went bust, a number of major players were stung as the value of Fannie and Freddie preferred shares plummeted. Principal amongst these players was Gateway Bank, which had a huge percentage of bank capital tied up in the preferreds.
Now Gateway has arranged a takeover by a rival smaller [...]

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In case you missed it, the financial system in the U.S. is near collapse. This weekend was unbelievable. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The world’s largest insurer AIG is looking for the Fed to help it avoid collapse and Merrill Lynch was forced to close a deal with Bank of America to save [...]

Update 06 Mar 2009: I am re-posting this because I am considering the view that Fannie and Freddie will be used to buy up mortgages, effectively nationalizing the U.S. Mortgage problem (see my last paragraphs). I had seen this as the likely result when the GSE were first put into conservatorship, but the Bush Administration was opposed to such an outcome. This is ever more likely now that Obama is in office.

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The post-mortems on Fannie and Freddie are flying in. It seems like it is almost non-stop Fannie and Freddie. Let me add to those voices with a bit of a twist: the bailout of Fannie and Freddie was as much a political move as it was a move to save financial markets.While [...]

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The finance and investing website Money Morning has a very provocative piece om Jim Rogers today. Rogers, who has been railing against the bailout of Fannie and Freddie for some time, thinks the Treasury and Federal Reserve will fail in their attempts to reflate the U.S. economy. He goes into great detail in [...]