July 09, 2012
In the Media
Letters: Mortgage Intervention
July 7, 2012
To the Editor:
In “Can Government Rescue Housing?” (Letters, July 1), a reader
argued against such intervention to write down mortgages, saying
that government laws and rules helped cause the housing mess in the
first place.
The letter included mention of the Community Reinvestment Act as
having required banks to lend to people “of dubious credit
quality.” But many of the lenders who made subprime loans were not
subject to that legislation, and a bank regulator in the George W.
Bush administration has said that the law was not a cause of the
crisis.
And to needle academics who might support government intervention,
the letter suggested that they would clearly oppose reducing the
cost of higher education via government-sanctioned write-downs of
their “outsize and unaffordable pensions.” I, like many
academics, do not have a defined-benefit pension, but rather a
retirement plan to which my employer and I each contribute money.
It will not be outsize — I wish it were! — but it is
affordable.
Jeff Sovern
Jamaica, Queens, July 1
The writer is a professor of law at St. John’s University and a
co-coordinator of the Consumer Law and Policy Blog.
A version of this letter appeared in print on July 8, 2012, on
page BU2 of the New York edition with the headline: Mortgage
Intervention.