http://www.buymyshitpile.com/

As for foreclosing. If you really want the gov't to be able to help, it is best if they hold the mortgage. No need to get lenders to play along. Jut renegotiate the terms.

Ideally the Treasury gets the price right. Too high you get inflation, to low deflation. The idea is to set a price, give firms capital, and restart the market for these securities.

(b) The plan is not to buy the loans, it's to buy the MBSs. The companies currently processing the loans would continue to process them.

(c) See (b). The government would just buy the MBSs. In theory, the owners of the MBSs have no control over how the mortgages are administered. (In practice, the government is very big and powerful, so it could undoubtedly influence mortgage administration in many ways if it wanted to. But it wouldn't have to.)

(d) The policies of the firms involved have already changed: risk models and tollerance have been massively revamped, mortgage lending standards are much more conservative, etc. The market took care of that part.

What does need to happen is that those responsible for the poor practices of the past are punished. Obviously, the market would take care of that, too, if we were to just let these firms fail. But since we are going to bail them out, we need to insure that the previous stockholders loose all or most of what they would have lost in the absence of a bailout. That means the government ought to get an equity stake proportional to its bail-out of each firm. This is the key way that the plan needs to be changed. (And this is what most economist critics of the plan are focusing on, but executive compensation and aid to homeowners.)

The AIG model is what works for me. We got equity, control, and it was a loan, not a gift. If we broke up AIG and sold its component parts, we could make a nifty profit off our $85 billion loan. If we tried reselling this shit, we could maybe get a scone.

Write your Senator and Congressperson today and let em know how you feel:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc&state=wa

I'm thinking that this engineered looting of national treasure is Wall Street's way of betting that Republicans lose the November elections. It's not historically uncommon for unseated aristocrats and autocrats to empty the coffers as their rivals march on the capital. Didn't Pompey steal Rome's gold as Caesar crossed the Rubicon? (or is that just on HBO?)

I also saw Bernanke saying he wants to pay closer to face than market value. Apparently he doesn't believe that mere price stability is enough, but wants to actually subsidize credit availability.

I didn't hear the NPR story that mentioned "outsourcing administration". If I had to give a guess, I'd guess they are refering to the decisions about how much of which securities to buy from which firms, not the administration of the mortgages behind them.

It's pretty clear this plan is still fuzzy and evolving, and given the political pushback we are seeing, it will probably evolve for a while longer. That's probably why the markets opened higher this morning, but closed lower as the degree of pushback became clearer.