Firearms Foresight While it seems other readers found irony in placing a large ad for gun sales in a paper whose headline included at least two horrific examples of gun violence, I found the ad timely and appropriate. ...more

March 16, 2009

U.S. mortgage rates dropped to the lowest level in nearly four decades this week as the government stepped up efforts to revive the housing market. ...more

January 1, 2009

Congratulations, or perhaps condolences, fellow taxpayers. On Sunday we all became mortgage bankers. ...more

September 9, 2008

The House on Wednesday easily approved legislation that seeks to slow the steepest slide in house prices in a generation, rescue hundreds of thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure and reassure global markets that mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not be allowed to fail. ...more

July 24, 2008

The news is bad all over. And if you're in the newspaper industry, you're not just reporting about it. You're living it. ...more

July 5, 2008

Most Americans feel compassionate about anyone facing foreclosure. Witnessing more than a million people staring down foreclosure due to home mortgages leaves all us wanting to save people from this sad situation. But before we spend billions in taxpayer dollars for a bailout, we need to consider how this happened in the first place. When we do that, we'll see that most of the people losing their houses never should have qualified for a home loan in the first place, and that predatory lenders are to blame for most of this mess. The Bush administration reached a deal with mortgage bankers to freeze interest rates on some sub-prime mortgages for five years. Other limitations apply, and only about 225,000 people will benefit from it. In fact, it's fair to say that if these homeowners are already in trouble, freezing interest rates won't help much – if at all. ...more

December 9, 2007