{"id":5084,"date":"2013-04-19T19:21:57","date_gmt":"2013-04-20T01:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5084"},"modified":"2013-04-19T19:21:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-20T01:21:57","slug":"property-of-the-state-housing-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5084","title":{"rendered":"Property of the state: housing policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/on.ft.com\/15rlri5\">Jim Pickard<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Socialism is a dirty word in many parts of the US. After all, America is a global symbol of free markets, muscular capitalism and the small state. Yet somehow the government has turned its mortgage market into a giant nationalised enterprise on a par with China\u2019s Red Army or Britain\u2019s National Health Service.<\/p>\n<p>US mortgage finance vehicle Fannie Mae, created by Franklin D Roosevelt to drag the US out of the Great Depression, underwrote around one in five mortgages during the 1940s. It was seen as the archetype of Keynesian intervention. Yet Roosevelt\u2019s efforts have been eclipsed by those made by 21st-century governments around the world to pull their economies out of the post-credit crunch tailspin.<\/p>\n<p>Today, in the US, almost nine out of 10 mortgages issued in the US are subsidised by the state through a bewildering array of state-sponsored groups. They include Freddie Mac, the Department of Veterans\u2019 Affairs, the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks and Fannie itself. Housing, in other words, has become an arm of the state.<\/p>\n<p>One of these groups, the Federal Housing Administration, is so integral to the market that without it prices could have fallen a further 25 per cent, according to Moody\u2019s Analytics.<\/p>\n<p>And at the same time the Federal Reserve is soaking up some $40bn of mortgage debt a month \u2013 through \u201cquantitative easing\u201d \u2013 with more than one eye on the housing market.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jim Pickard: Socialism is a dirty word in many parts of the US. After all, America is a global symbol of free markets, muscular capitalism and the small state. Yet somehow the government has turned its mortgage market into a giant nationalised enterprise on a par with China\u2019s Red Army or Britain\u2019s National Health Service. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}