During the presidential campaign, the housing debate sometimes had more to do with how many homes a candidate owned than about solutions to the nation's housing crisis. At other times, specious claims were made that the current foreclosure crisis was caused by Fannie Mae, or by policies started in the...

If Joe the Plumber can't save the leaking McCain-Palin campaign from sinking, he may also take to the bottom the appeal of trickle down politics.

Senator McCain and Governor Palin are out on the campaign trail holding up a caricature--Joe the Slogan--as a great American. Instead, they should be...

Civil discourse over fundamental issues is hard to find in our increasingly polarized politics. So it is with a bit of a leap of faith that this week a Cato Institute free market, flat tax booster and I attempt to have a sensible dialogue about the housing market, economic turmoil,...

As schoolchildren know, the Liberty Bell is inscribed with the words "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

Liberty in America is often equated with economic freedom. Constrain one's freedom to make a deal -- even a bad deal -- some argue, and liberty is...

Breathe easy, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, shoddy rating agencies, easy-money Fed, high-pressure loan originators, and other titans of the financial world who aided and abetted selling tens of millions of anti-consumer subprime loans since 2001. The far right pundits have finally revealed who really is to blame for the near-ruin of...

By David M. Abromowitz and Andrew Jakabovics

Unless U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's first stab at a $700 billion rescue of the global financial system is revised to incorporate restructuring troubled mortgages, it will be neither fair nor effective. Paulson's draft legislation attempts to rescue the balance sheets of...

There must be a Republican playbook circulating widely with a chapter entitled, "What to say if asked who's to blame for the foreclosure mess." Because an awful lot of Republican candidates are all suddenly yelling "Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae" whenever plunging home prices and the housing crisis comes...

Home mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac opened for business yesterday not as the government-sponsored entities they once were but rather under direct government conservatorship. This dramatic semi-nationalization of America's primary home mortgage companies is justified under the circumstances given that nearly 1 in 10 home mortgage borrowers today...

Arizona now has the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in America, with 9,540 foreclosures in February, up 210 percent from 2007. So maybe it's natural that Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) would want to revise history by shifting blame for the crash in...

As the Roaring Twenties were sowing the seeds of the Great Depression, the chronicler of that age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, famously remarked, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."...