Philip Davis

Options Trader: Tough-Decisions Tuesday

David, your idea is interesting but, like Cover says "who would do it." Actually the answer is English people, who still have 100-year lease-holds when they buy property sometimes but I don't think people would like it here, although they do go for reverse mortgages, which give you a little money until you die (as long as you are expected to die soon, actuarily).

I do not disagree with DC - enough with the bailouts but we will bail out bank after bank after bank if we don't do something about the reason they are failing. Buffet stopped insuring accounts over the FDIC limit in Kansas - that's not a good sign! The FACT of the matter is the FDIC simply doesn't have enough money to cover one major failure, yet alone something on the scale of the last S&L crisis.

This is not about fiscal discipline anymore. This is coming home and finding your basement flooding from a broken pipe and the Feds solution is to keep going to the store to buy more paper towels. It just isn't addressing the problem. The loans have been sold, people are in homes they never should have been allowed to occupy at appraised values that never should have been put on a form (that is not the homeowner's fault).

Junk (thanks for nice words yesterday by the way), I don't think you can clear this brush without losing the forest. What would happen to your home's value if one in 5 around you were empty with foreclosure signs?

This is a national crisis and kicking 5M families onto the streets, even if 2M of them were greedy and knew they were getting in over their heads, is not going to solve anything.