Felix Salmon Issues a Plea

As usual, Felix nails it:

Please can the punditosphere stop referring to the mortgage-freeze plan as a “bailout”? As Edmund Andrews says in his first sentence on the front page of the NYT today, it isn’t. The FHA’s FHASecure plan, which has existed for ages, might conceivably be considered a bailout. This one involves no government money or government guarantees, and there’s no transfer of funds from the taxpayer to anybody at all. So it’s not a bailout. Thank you.

He’s right. There’s zero public money at stake. The LTCM bailout of 1998 is also often referred to as a bailout. In fact, I just did. The Federal Reserve helped organize it, but no government money was involved. As someone who often criticizes the Fed, that’s exactly what they should have done.

Posted by on December 10th, 2007 at 11:07 am


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