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• Related Materials

  • A Word From the Speaker
    By Sebastian Mallaby, Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics
    Op-Ed
    July 9, 2007

  • A Conversation with Jim Webb (Audio)
    Audio
    June 9, 2008

  • Reform, the FDR Way
    By Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History
    Op-Ed
    July 23, 2007

  • Is freedom failing?
    By Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
    Article
    Vol. 169, No. 21

  • AZ Central: McCain's Advisers
    By Billy House
    Must Read
    August 11, 2006

  See Also

  Economic Development, Congress, U.S. Election 2008

  Housing Sense in Congress?

  Author:	Sebastian Mallaby, Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics

  April 21, 2008
  Washington Post

  Presidential candidates insist that Washington needs fixing, and we in the commentariat love to expose hypocrisy, pork-barreling and gridlock. So it feels awkward to admit the truth about the subprime meltdown. First Congress produced a timely and well-crafted stimulus. Now it is working on proposals to help homeowners, and with one ugly exception, the recommendations are sound.

  Why, you might ask, even bother to help homeowners? They have no moral claim to government assistance. People who are falling behind on their mortgages generally aren’t poor, since the poor tend not to buy houses in the first place. They generally aren’t deserving, since they chose to take on mortgages they could not afford. When thousands of needier Americans languish on the waiting list for housing assistance, there’s no compelling case for lavishing federal dollars on the profligate middle class.

  But there is a case for preventing profligates from harming bystanders. When homeowners fail to pay their debts and go into foreclosure, their homes stand empty and attract looters and squatters, dragging down the value of neighborhoods. Falling home prices depress consumer spending; the economy gets rockier, driving home prices down further. It is this threat of a negative spiral, not sob stories from homeowners, that warrants limited federal assistance to families facing foreclosure.

  Of course, some fall in house prices is necessary. But absent federal action, market failure will cause real estate to fall further than the basics of supply and demand would justify.

  View full text of article

• 

  New CFR Books

  

  In Termites in the Trading System, Jagdish Bhagwati reveals how the rapid spread of preferential trade agreements endangers the world trading system.

  

  America Between the Wars explores how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today.

  

  In The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

  Complete list of CFR Books.

  

  

  New Independent Task Force Reports

  Confronting Climate Change

  This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.

  U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality

  This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.

  About Independent Task Forces at the Council.

  

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