In 2011, the Government Mortgage Complex accounted for 88 percent of all first-mortgage originations in the United States, with the government also controlling an estimated 90 percent of the student loan market. The government’s growing dominance in the home mortgage and student loan categories is cause for concern, posing a threat to private investors, borrowers, and taxpayers.

Here is another good news/bad news column about the 112th Congress.

America’s national debt now exceeds $15 trillion, which is roughly equal to the value of all goods and services the U.S. economy produces in one year. If left unchecked, America's debt will have catastrophic consequences for the future of the nation. How did we arrive at this point?

The primary drivers of our growing debt burden are the “Big 3” entitlements of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yet as part of the debt ceiling deal that created sequestration when the Super Committee failed, politicians effectively fenced off nearly two-thirds of the federal budget and the main source of our over-spending. 

Some states have maintained balanced or near-balanced budgets through the financial crisis, while others have run significant deficits. Some have responsibly funded their pensions even during difficult times, while others have fallen back on borrowing and accounting tricks. The differences arise from how hard different states were hit by the recession and how hard their elected officials worked to address their budget problems.

The United States' budget deficit has placed its public finances on a clearly unsustainable path, even before considering the serious public finance problems at the state level. US public debt levels as a percent of GDP are on a path to reach within a year or two those levels at which a funding crisis in Europe's periphery was triggered.

Sir, Peter Tasker is overly sanguine in counselling the Japanese government to ignore the credit rating agencies' recent downgrading of Japanese government debt.

Public pension accounting standards encourage state and local governments to promise too much, fund too little and take too much risk with their investments.