The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most common way U.S. buyers finance a home purchase, isn’t the ideal instrument its supporters claim it to be.

In less than twenty-five years, government “affordable housing” and other housing policies have turned a healthy market into a financial ruin. Until Fannie and Freddie’s market dominance and the government’s role in the housing finance system are substantially reduced or eliminated, the United States will continue to have an inferior and unstable housing market.

History has shown--and simple economics would anticipate--that a government subsidy for a freely prepayable 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is not good policy.

Low mortgage underwriting standards were partially responsible for the collapse of the housing market. Now that standards have been raised to prevent another collapse, there are calls to bring them back down again.

In order to prevent the next housing bubble, countercyclical loan-to-value limits in the form of increased down-payment requirements must be implemented in order to discourage the inrush of speculative inflation.

Congress created the credit union charter in 1934 to establish small, local, mutual associations of “people of small means seeking to protect themselves from high rate money lenders.” A lot has changed in the intervening seventy years, including the transformation of many formerly mutual organizations into stock-issuing corporations, and the...

The California budget crisis may well lead to a second financial calamity that would be far worse than anything experienced over the past eighteen months.

Rapid growth in the P2P industry has given rise to concerns over appropriate regulation of this alternative form of lending.