Sustained economic recovery will remain elusive in America, post-crash, until principal is reduced on some 10-13 million underwater home mortgage loans across the nation. Yet in the case of privately securitized loans, these write-downs are all but impossible to carry out on the requisite scale...

This paper, commissioned by the Seattle City Council, takes the measure of Seattle's post-bubble negative equity and foreclosure problems, estimates numbers of underwater loans that have benefitted by existing federal, state and local programs, and recommends several options that the City has...

Since the global financial dramas of 2008-09, authorities on financial regulation have come increasingly to counsel the inclusion of macroprudential policy instruments in the standard ‘toolkit' of finance-regulatory measures employed by financial supervisors. The hallmark of this perspective...

Eight years out from the Great Crash of 2008-09, the recovering American and global economies continue to recover at best slowly. The “Great Delevering” that many prescribed or predicted as a prerequisite to real recovery has to some extent occurred, yet this levering-down has, ironically,...

I propose here a critical amendment to Treasury Secretary Paulson's proposed "bailout" plan for troubled financial institutions. If we channel the plan through FHA and its recently re-federalized GSE siblings, I argue, we shall neatly avoid all objections currently raised to the plan - those...