Bell articolo:
Per far riprendere il mercato immobiliare le banche devono ricominciare a concedere mutui a porci e cani. Ma con una sostanziale differenza...
Pensavate che fosse possibile, per i governi occidentali, imparare una lezione dopo una batosta storica che ha quasi messo in ginocchio interi continenti? Ebbene: sbagliato. Non si impara mai nulla.
D'altronde quando si aderisce ciecamente ad una dottrina che non richiede neppure di essere capita, questi sono rischi che si corrono. Ricordate ad esempio il disastro dei mutui facili? Se a un qualsiasi cittadino in strada menzionate le parole "mutui subprime", inorridisce, si segna e invoca i santi: anche i bambini sanno infatti che all'origine della crisi mondiale, specialmente dal lato americano dell'Atlantico, c'è lo scandalo dei subprime elargiti a piene mani e che alla fine hanno causato crash di banche e conseguenti pesantissimi bailout. Se ne è parlato a iosa.
E' passato appena qualche anno, siamo ancora in mezzo al guado (senza sapere neppure se ne usciremo) e Obama cosa fa? Per stimolare l'economia... invita le banche ad elargire mutui anche a chi non può pagare.
Per i numerosi increduli, ecco la fedele traduzione e il link al Washington Post:
L'amministrazione Obama spinge le banche a concedere mutui anche alle persone con poca affidabilità creditizia.
E' uno sforzo che gli esperti credono aiuterà la ripresa dell'economia, ma che gli scettici sostengono aprirà le porte ai prestiti rischiosi che hanno già causato il crash immobiliare. Gli addetti dell'amministrazione garantiscono di stare lavorando affinché le banche prestino a un più vasto numero di persone avvantaggiandosi dei programmi pubblici che assicurano i mutui contro il default.
Si sta anche pressando il Dipartimento della Giustizia perché fornisca assicurazioni alle banche, diventate molto caute, che non dovranno affrontare problemi legali o finanziari se concederanno mutui ai clienti a rischio che oggi corrispondono agli standard ma che un domani andranno in bancarotta.
Insomma, se si è capito l'oscuro linguaggio politico-legale: per far riprendere il mercato immobiliare le banche devono ricominciare a concedere mutui a porci e cani. Con la differenza che, se stavolta va di nuovo tutto a gambe all'aria, lo Stato tampona coi soldi pubblici e le banche la passano liscia.
E noi che credevamo che non avessero imparato la lezione: l'hanno imparata eccome.
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Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit
View Photo Gallery — Obama administration struggles to help homeowners: A look at the Obama administration’s efforts in trying to help homeowners and bring the nation out of its housing slump.
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Published: April 3
The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.
President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.
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In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.
Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.
Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.
Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.
“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae.
Administration officials say they are looking only to allay unnecessary hesitation among banks and encourage safe lending to borrowers who have the financial wherewithal to pay.
“There’s always a tension that you have to take seriously between providing clarity and rules of the road and not giving any opportunity to restart the kind of irresponsible lending that we saw in the mid-2000s,” said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record.
The administration’s efforts come in the midst of a housing market that has been surging for the past year but that has been delivering most of the benefits to established homeowners with high credit scores or to investors who have been behind a significant number of new purchases.
“If you were going to tell people in low-income and moderate-income communities and communities of color there was a housing recovery, they would look at you as if you had two heads,” said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit housing organization. “It is very difficult for people of low and moderate incomes to refinance or buy homes.”