Come on Dean, This Bill is really about providing our Washington Polls with stump speech material to get them reelected, we all know that. So what if it costs us $30 Billion or so, it's for a good cause, isn't it?

I don't know. Perhaps you haven't seen the studies that have shown that only a minority of the foreclosed end up renting a house or apartment. A plurality end up with friends/family, while a good number end up homeless. (Yes, living in your car is homeless.) Landlords use credit reports to vet tenants and a foreclosure (and the other attendant credit problems often prevents tenants from obtaining housing.

I'm more upset though about the decision of our local housing/redevelopment authority to use their pot of the housing purchase money to buy up the drek de la drek of the foreclosed properties, instead of looking for good properties to purchase as permanent affordable housing. See http://www.sacbee.com/103/story/1105298.html

Besides the motivation the politicians have to help those who help them fund their campaigns, I wonder if the fact that so many Fannie and Freddie shares and securities were owned by foreigners played a role in this bail out? Leaving all those foreign creditors in the lurch would definitely had caused some hard feelings.

On what does the CBO base these numbers? Is this based on some solid numbers, general trends of foreclosure in non-disaster years, or are they just guestimating based on the available data about the people affected?

When they throw numbers like this around, I think it's fair to ask what the internals are, because they sound awful definite to me, and I don't see how that's possible. I'm not saying I can't be wrong, I'm just asking.

Are people losing the option of immediate foreclosure as a result of the bill?

Then they have been really HARMED.

Check out a good blog spot:
http://psychologyofthecall.blogspot.com/

I think Paulson's Fannie and Freddie fiasco is going to cost taxpayers at least 1.2 trillion dollars. That's not even counting the depreciation effects that it will have on the dollar.

This bill is about rescuing Washington's fiscal masters.

Early analysis of Hope Now is showing that 75+% of homedebtors in hard-hit areas - FL and CA - are going into foreclosure a second time.

Revolutions have been fought over less than this, back when people cared enough to stir off their couches.

There has been a plan to offload the bad derivative debt instruments of the finance industry and dodd/paulson/bernanke and the OFHEO have been executing it for 2 yrs now. Thats why in the last year or so OFHEO has allowed Fannie/Freddie and regional home loans banks to accepts all forms of collateralized debt obligations from Banks and investment houses(for which there was no market as everyone knows said debt was worth at most, 10-30% of stated value)and give them treasury securities in exchange. In doing so, the fed gov has allowed wallstreet to offload a great deal of their bad debt and traded them $1 in value of treasuries for a .20 in value of collateralized negligently underwritten debt. That's a 70% loss given to these GSE's.

Now in phase 2 of bailout the treasury/congress/ofheo has told congress to expand the federal deficit capacity by 1.4 trillion dollars(which is not mentioned in news stories) and the CBO quotes a 25 billion estimate for the bailout, which is a laughable underestimate. The capacity increase for the deficit of 1.4 tril was done to enable fannie/freddie/fhlb's to be bailed out by the the us taxpayer under the guise of supporting the entire american housing injury.

They couldn't sell a direct bailout to the taxpayer of wallstreeters which is why they played this risk transfer hot potato game to get bad debt out of the hands of the rich and into the fed gov't thereby salvaging credibility for the greedy private financial system that was sadly given a steroid injection when the glass stegal act was repealed and the OFHEO in 1992 was created.

Welcome to America

Maybe you've covered this elsewhere, but it seems to me in practice you're dealing with a tertiary consideration. In either order, the first two are the political need to be seen as "doing something," and the effort to slow down the credit contraction. The latter goal would be served by the housing bill in a number of ways: kicking some foreclosure cans down the road will have the same effect on personal bankruptcies, bank failures, and credit spreads may stay tighter for longer. Letting the bad credits, bad mortgages, bad banks, etc. fail more slowly gives the "good" banks time to rebuild their balance sheets through the magic of the steep yield curve, capital infusions, and so on. This is not to endorse this government engineering project, but to describe what I think is really going on here. Not that the general media is likely to understand, let alone report it this way...

Namazu:
I wish that was the plan but I'm afraid that the Fed and treasury are just juggling the balls trying to prevent systemic failure.
I think they knew that at some point this will happen.
Headline:Bad debt bombshell from National Australia Bank
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24078649-664,00.html

The shadow banking system is about to collapse and they are trying to prevent a total meltdown of the GSE's.