HAMP'D: How Geithner May Cost Obama Reelection
As I've said many times, if the economy fails to turn around sufficiently in time for the election it will in large part due to the failure of HAMP. It was bad in that it screwed a lot of individuals and failed to help enough, but it was also bad because it failed to help the macroeconomy.
From the rortybomb link:
Gagnon earlier in his talk said that “one of the biggest goals [. . .] was to push down the mortgage rate to spark a refinancing boom to encourage households and enable households to reduce their expenditures and repair their balance sheets and be able to spend again. That worked not quite as well as we hoped because the administration’s program for getting underwater borrowers to borrow didn’t work and I think that’s a true disaster that has no excuse. I have nothing but [. . .] blame [for] the administration on not doing this[ . . .] This could have been a huge success. [. . .]" I haven’t heard this critique before and I thought it was really interesting.
(Emphasis supplied.) I know rortybomb does not read TalkLeft but Atrios has only written about this about a gajillion times. Weird that he says he has not heard this critique before.
Speaking for me only
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