Friday, October 8, 2010

Forward on Reverse: Reverse Mortgages as National Security Assets from National Mortgage Professional Magazine by Atare E. Agbamu

Who would've thought? My little old lady physician, that's been our family's family doctor practically my whole life, was into the mortgage and underwriting business? Anyway, it was sitting in the waiting room, and my phone was out of battery. So I picked it up, and stopped at this article. I was only on it for a few seconds, honestly, but I just couldn't believe that this guy was quoting Greenspan: In his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan argued that private resources must be part of the solution to America’s entitlements-influenced fiscal problems. Home equity is private resource. Yeah, and he'd basically retracted that whole idea when he testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I made a mistake, he basically said. Yeah, for almost 20 years, he'd been making that same mistake.

Woops.



That all said, the book reads awfully naively. The Wizard, right? It sounds that way, because he's all throaty and stuff when he testifies, and he has ton of baggy skin. But on paper, the text, the way he writes sort of openly about how he feels about all of the various topics that seem to run through (such as, if he were a terrorist and wanted to inflict some real damage, he'd hit the electronic transfers systems instead of blowing up a few buildings; this would immediately shut down the economy he says). On paper, it makes sense that he'd fess up to a "mistake" on Capitol Hill that way; he's an empirical guy, ultimately, and he goes off the data, and he's really just trying to make the best decisions he can. It was an honest mistake. Check out these pundits: The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in a Capitalist Economy, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't. Oh, there's a ton of them. Check out the Kindle samples.

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