My Mortgage Blog

I feel as if I’ve been chasing the news these past few weeks.

It was probably predictable that the gradual increase in the noise about whether the country would be allowed effectively to go broke would soon ease off as politicians thought perhaps a bit more deeply about the hole they could be digging for our economy.

Still, I rushed with all the newsmongers toward the edge of yet another precipice, thinking "not another cliff. Puh-leeze!" But the cliff was there, metaphorically speaking, waiting for us to plunge.

Now we have yet another non-answer to the problems facing us. (Instead of defaulting on our debt, as you know, we punted the can four months down the road, and now we march toward that can, knowing full well that another round of talks on cutting the debt is likely to be as non-productive as the last.) Kicking the can, therefore, was a non-answer; we are far from a lasting solution to a huge problem.

But I’ve already shifted my attention somewhat to the new rules issued by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau regarding the origination of loans. Here, I keep thinking I should feel far more enthusiasm than confusion about the solutions being raised before us. The still-mysterious Qualifying Mortgage sounds very much like a loan with Freddie or Fannie breathing hot fire down its neck a tougher version of loans that seem vaguely to have helped because the problems were still trying to overcome.

The new rules don’t become law for a year, giving the government plenty of time to adjust what they have created to any emerging reality because, believe it, this will be a year of change and we can count on these rules and regulations going through a lengthy gauntlet of criticism and emerging wearing new clothes.

Already, it feels as if we get new news (a humorous expression) about the rules every few hours. The way loan officers will be paid will change. The work of servicing a loan from the moment the borrower leaves the office will be different. The industry will never be the same. Really?

These weren’t the impressions I got a few days, when the new rules first stumbled timidly on to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The first articles about how experts were reacting to the new rules were scattered, unclear. The experts, it seems, were themselves the source of the lack of clarity. No one seemed to have an organized idea of what we were looking at.

And so I joined the masses, you probably did too, trying to chase down an accurate idea of an important new set of regulations. Is this going to impact our business life in profound ways? What is it going to mean to the average Joe who wants to take out a mortgage and buy a house? When and how will we be able to feel we’ve gathered the information we need to make good judgments on these changes?

Is this for real, big, enduring- a landmark change, or just another dart thrown in the dark? We will probably know soon. In the meantime, however, it feels as if we are legislating by a radical kind of guesswork, and I cant help but fear that the attention has been focused on avoiding the problems of the past the subprime loans gone ballistic, the mortgage-backed bonds sliced into incomprehensible investment programs rather than putting our best creative energies into imagining forth a new, far more workable future.

More very soon, though.