Tuesday, April 22, 2008

A Girl's Eye View Of The Subprime Solution

I have written about cavebat before. She is a very smart woman who lives in The Bronx and has excellent opinions about things. She's one of those people whose opinions are usually heavily rooted in actual facts, unlike me who roots his opinions in emotion and pop-culture reference. I share many of cavebat's political positions and try to read her blog regularly.

She is the only person who remembers that the subprime mortgage crisis happened previously, in the early 1990s, and everyone seems to forget that. Everyone is acting as if this is a freak accident, a once-in-a-lifetime event! Wrong!

In an article earlier this month, cavebat laid out a plan for addressing the subprime mortgage crisis and preventing it in the future. Her steps:

1. Require that the CEO and Chairman of the Board be two different people.

2. Require that exercised pay-for-performance compensation options be held for 1-3 years after exercise.

3. Return the GSEs to non-public status.

4. Require the GSEs to purchase problem sub-prime mortgages from originators at appropriate value.

5. Require the GSEs to return to their mandate of housing for low-income Americans.

6. Reduce leverage.

7. Don’t create or eliminate any agencies or regulators.

Read If You're So Smart.

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