Review: Why Can't Something Be Done About Our Broken Home Mortgage System?

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But there is widespread agreement among policy makers on at least this element of investors' argument [for a continued government backstop, as in the bipartisan Corker-Warner bill], which is that you cannot keep a cheap, long-term, fixed-rate mortgage available to the wide swath of Americans through big economic ups and downs without some sort of government backstop. There is a reason no other country has such a product. For all the supposed ideological purity in today's Washington, no politician wants to be responsible for the loss of something Americans have come to see as a right.