This entry is cross-posted on the DMI blog.

Over the last two years, while home foreclosures overtook, torpedoed and then finally sank the economy, the White House and Congress took promises from banks to modify mortgages and passed them off as national foreclosure prevention policy. As my father would...

As easy a mark as Wall Street bonuses have become for those critical of corporate greed and corruption, President Obama's calling them "shameful" and citing Wall Street's actions as the "height of irresponsibility" may signal a significant shift in the government's tone towards corporate culture. For all his Christian...

This entry is cross-posted on DMI blog.

Let me make it plain: I have no love for regulators or the idea of government controlling financial institutions.

In the late nineties, after the credit union I co-founded struggled with loan losses and high operating costs, the National Credit Union...

In all my years of running non-profits and a financial institution, I was expected to account for every penny my organization received. Whether it was for a general operating grant or a cash flow loan, detailed reporting -- including financial statements, budget narratives, and a description of what the money...

While I guess it made for interesting reading, there's not much that should be regarded as "news" in yesterday's New York Times article about how the Bush administration fueled the housing crisis through deregulation and the careless inflation of the housing bubble. The housing polices of the late nineties...

This entry is cross-posted on DMI blog.

Tenants who live in homes facing foreclosure are among the most invisible victims of the foreclosure crisis. As their landlords lose ownership, the financial institutions holding or servicing the mortgage typically toss the tenants out on the street in order to clear...

The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy yesterday released its 2008 Year In Review. report It includes some of the best urban policies of the year, and my favorite entry is Cleveland's going after predatory lenders to account for the damage that foreclosures and equity stripping have...

This entry is cross-posted on the DMI blog.

n yesterday's New York Times, Howard Husock at the Manhattan Institute repeated the tired old argument that housing advocates and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing meltdown. It's one thing for the Times to offer a range of ideological...

A version of this entry was posted on the DMI blog.

It's remarkable how the Bush Administration keeps missing the mark on the mortgage and foreclosure crisis.

It couldn't be more obvious that this country needs a response to the financial crisis that allows the housing bubble to...

This entry is cross-posted on the DMI blog

Every time I'm in public settings and talk about the need for regulation and the reform of the financial services industry, I caution that, like rat poison that leads to poison-resistant rats, implementing stronger rules around the financial services sector eventually...

This entry is cross-posted on the DMI blog

There used to be time when the idea of a national moratorium on foreclosures was largely seen as an impractical, if not radical, idea. The conventional wisdom has generally been that it is a political non-starter: The government would never sanction...

As reports emerge that FDIC chair Sheila Bair is being considered for Treasury Secretary, I am transported to a point in time over a year ago, when Bair fired a shot heard around the banking and economic justice world. On October 19, 2007, in a New York Times...

Think of it this way. The American homeowner is underwater and drowning, and Fannie and Freddie have just thrown in a spool of thread to pull them out.

At a time when it is increasingly obvious that the foreclosure crisis is poised to take down the entire economy, the feds...

The voting booths hadn't even cooled down from last night's historic election, before the Wall Street Journal exploited the moment by not only suggesting that "racism as a barrier to achievement" will no longer exist now that a black man has been elected, but by actually declaring that these...

It was inevitable that the closer we got to addressing the foreclosure crisis through some form of nationalized, system-wide mortgage restructuring effort, the more homeowners would be crying foul. A headline from a New York Times article says it all: "A Mortgage Plan May Aid Many Homeowners, but it...

It's hard to express how wildly absurd the right-wing suggestion is that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) created the subprime crisis.

According to the FDIC "In 1977, Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to encourage federally insured banks and thrifts to help meet the credit needs of their...