President Obama on Wednesday rolled out new proposals aimed at helping troubled homeowners, including a plan that would allow more borrowers to take advantage of record-low interest rates and lower their monthly mortgage payments.
Up to 3.5 million people who do not currently have federally backed loans might be eligible for the program, administration officials said. Another 11 million people who currently hold government-backed loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also could potentially benefit.
The renewed efforts, which the president announced late morning at the James Lee Community Center in Falls Church, were foreshadowed during Obama’s State of the Union address last week. They mark another of a series of initiatives aimed at lifting the nation’s ailing housing market as consensus is growing rapidly that the housing woes are holding back the economic recovery.
“It triggered the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes,” Obama said of the housing bubble that burst four years ago. “And it has been the single biggest drag on our recovery from a terrible recession. Crushing debt has kept millions of consumers from spending. A lack of building demand has kept hundreds of thousands of construction workers idle. The challenge is massive in size and scope.”
A central piece of the president’s plan would allow qualified homeowners to refinance their mortgages at current historically low interest rates. Unlike earlier proposals, the new refinance measure would cover not only home loans guaranteed by federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but also those owned by private investors, according to senior administration officials.
The cost of undertaking those refinancings, Obama said last week, would be paid for by a fee on large financial firms to ensure “it won’t add to the deficit and will give those banks that were rescued by the taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.”
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3 Responses
He’s out of his mind. We tried that last time, we could have lost our house & our rate went up. Oh, & the guy who supposedly was going to arrange it all is now in jail.
Don’t be fooled, if the company holding your mortgage doesn’t participate (& you may not know until the end of the process) you could be in worse shape. Be very careful: if it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
So after blaming the banks for lending money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back a few years ago these same people, ie. Obama and all the Dems, are going to do the same thing again. He said today that the money would be given without credit checks. What? Isn’t that what got us in to this mess in the first place? Forcing banks to lend money to people who had low or no imcome and then wonder why so many went in to foreclosure?
Another thing. He pledged 5-10 billion dollars for this program and then said it could help 3.5 miilion people
And then said another 11 million people will get helped. If you take 5 million people and pump 10 billion dollars each person will only get about $2,000. Am I missing something or does the weasel-n-chief have greater amounts of money that he will just give away to help those who need it?