Washington, DC (NAPSI) - At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the U.S. government bailed out our nation’s banks and nationalized our home mortgage system.
Four years later, most of those bailouts have ended and taxpayers have been repaid in full. Unfortunately, that is not the case for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Remarkably, they remain in government control, continue to dominate the mortgage market, and still owe taxpayers over $140 billion.
Neither Congress nor the White House has a viable plan to get that money back or to get the government out of housing finance. As a result, taxpayers—not banks or investors—are now on the hook for trillions of dollars of mortgage risk. And the government continues to add to that risk, accounting for over 90 percent of new mortgage credit today, double the amount it provided just a few years ago. Even worse, recent actions inWashingtonthreaten to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac permanent wards of the state.
Moreover, millions of potential homeowners cannot get a mortgage because private sources of housing credit are scarce. Many of those private sources cannot compete with the government.
Your elected representatives inWashingtonaren’t paying attention to this problem!
But there is a plan to fix it. Former officials from the Obama and Bush administrations, Jim Millstein and Phillip Swagel, have crafted a way to restart private housing markets, ensure access to affordable 30-year mortgages, protect taxpayers from future bailouts, and repay them for saving the two largest sources of housing finance in our country: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Millstein and Swagel discussed their plan in their recent article for The Washington Post.
Call your representatives in Congress. Let them know that we need to end the last bailout and the nationalization of our home mortgage system. Go to www.whoismyrepresentative.com to tell them that you support housing finance reform.
Under a new proposal to restructure the housing market, the mortgage guarantee businesses would be privatized.
