Bush-Obama Bank Bailout Puts Mortgage Holders Last

Have you ever wondered what else we could be doing with the trillion dollars we’re bailing out the banks with?

That would cover universal health care for every single American for nine or ten years, for instance.

But even just focusing on the mortgage and banking sector itself, we could be doing a lot better with all this money than what Bush and Obama have been doing, which is lavishing it on Wall Street.

For the $1 trillion dollars in bank bailouts so far, the government could have bought several of these zombie banks outright, liquidated the shareholders, cleaned up the balance sheets, and run the banks in the interest of the community: giving loans to businesses and individuals.

Or by my calculations, it could have paid off, in full, five million mortgages (averaging $200,000 each) of people who were behind in payments or facing foreclosure.

These people would then own their homes free and clear rather than be in the streets.

Or the government could have sent a $17,000 voucher for mortgage paydown to every single mortgage holder in America.

Boy, if you wanted to stimulate the economy, that could have really gotten things going.

Either of those actions would have helped out the banks at the same time, since they would have fewer bad mortgages to worry about, but at least homeowners would have benefited along with the banks.

Or, when it gave billions of dollars to the banks, it could have required them to renegotiate all their mortgages that were drawn up from 2004-2007, writing down the purchase price by 20 percent or so to account for the inflated bubble prices that people paid. This way, the assets on the banks’ balance sheets would be worth less, and people would have less to shell out over the term of their mortgage.

Instead, with the Bush-Obama approach, the banks benefit every time, but the mortgage holders don’t.

There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.