So, Japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late '80s.

But that is precisely why a government managed mortgage market is dangerous.

If you get a mortgage but then lose your job, you have bad luck.

An extreme case is Spain, where mortgage debt is never extinguished, not even after a personal bankruptcy.

So far, the sub prime crisis has had a limited direct impact on Latin America s mortgage markets. In Mexico, the market for new low and middle income housing has grown rapidly, thanks to the creation of a market for residential mortgage securities in 2003.

The sub prime mortgage crisis has shown how lack of international coordination and regulation can exacerbate the inherent fragility of financial markets.

So far, the sub prime crisis has had a limited direct impact on Latin America s mortgage markets.

Today s global crisis was triggered by the collapse of the US housing bubble, but it was not caused by it. America s credit excesses were in residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and student loans.

To be sure, the US has long provided subsidies to owner occupied housing mostly through the tax deduction for mortgage interest.

Today s global crisis was triggered by the collapse of the US housing bubble, but it was not caused by it.

The mortgage crisis and the credit crunch have led to bailouts for the banks and the nationalization of housing finance and insurance.

The IMF s Internal Evaluation Office is more directly scathing in its assessment of the Fund s obliviousness to the US subprime crisis as it emerged.

Investment bankers have been losing their cushy jobs because they could not figure out any convincing way to price distressed mortgage debt.

Few people foresaw the subprime crisis of 2008, the risk of default in the eurozone, or the current turbulence in financial markets worldwide.

The government may also need to consider injecting funds more directly into the mortgage sector while the private sector reconstitutes itself.

Why, for example, did China s decision to accumulate foreign reserves result in a mortgage lender in Ohio taking excessive risks?

Will the US mortgage market, which is expected to become even more difficult in 2008, subside into calm afterwards, or will it contaminate the whole international financial system?

China s currency peg has also come in handy for Europe in its fight to keep inflation in check, while its monetary policy remains constrained by the sub prime crisis.

And the National Agency for Financial Studies reports that only 2 of Russians are prepared to take on a mortgage, owing largely to the uncertainty that plagues the market.

It is perplexing because in conventional analyses of which activities should be in the public domain, running the national mortgage market is never mentioned.

What is news is the Obama administration s reluctant and belated recognition that its efforts to get the housing and mortgage markets working again have largely failed.

CAMBRIDGE The sub prime mortgage crisis has demonstrated once again how hard it is to tame finance, an industry that is both the lifeline of modern economies and their gravest threat.

The US Federal Reserve is sometimes blamed for the current mortgage crisis, because excessively loose monetary policy allegedly fueled the price boom that preceded it. Indeed, the real (inflation corrected) federal funds rate was negative for 31 months, from October 2002 to April 2005.

The US Federal Reserve is sometimes blamed for the current mortgage crisis, because excessively loose monetary policy allegedly fueled the price boom that preceded it.

Ketika krisis keuangan global terjadi di tahun 2008, Hank Paulson, Menteri Keuangan Amerika Serikat, pernah memperingatkan dengan menyampaikan bahwa risiko risiko krisis keuangan yang diakibatkan oleh iklim dapat mengkerdilkan risiko risiko krisis subprima.

First, housing can be made more affordable for poor and middle income Americans by converting the mortgage deduction into a cashable tax credit.

CAMBRIDGE The sub prime mortgage crisis has demonstrated once again how hard it is to tame finance, an industry that is both the lifeline of modern economies and their gravest threat.

Moreover, the US housing market appears to be stabilizing....Overall, the US mortgage market has remained resilient, although the sub prime segment has deteriorated a bit more rapidly than had been expected.

When the housing bubble burst and financial markets collapsed in its wake, growth slumped worldwide as never before since the Great Depression.

When the sub prime crisis erupted in early September 2007, I published an article entitled Why Now is a Good Time to Sell the Dollar in a prominent financial publication.

But, as a result of no recourse mortgages in many US states, the entire mortgage debt was then extinguished, even if the value of the home was too low to cover the balance still due.

Moreover, the US housing market appears to be stabilizing....Overall, the US mortgage market has remained resilient, although the sub prime segment has deteriorated a bit more rapidly than had been expected.

But, while it was a highly leveraged mortgage market that fueled the financial crisis 11 years later, the idea, he said, has not made headway anywhere in the world.

When normal mortgages did not prime the pump enough, he encouraged them to take out variable rate mortgages at a time when interest rates had nowhere to go but up.

Likewise, the problem was not mentioned in one of the IMF s flagship publications, the Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR), in September 2006, just ten months before the sub prime mortgage crisis became apparent to all.

With virtually no earned income and dwindling savings, the unemployed are least able to manage the current surge in gasoline and food prices, they are effectively shut off from credit, and many have mortgage debt that exceed the value of their homes.