MEASUREMENT WITHOUT DATA
Afraid of a robust solution, the Bush Administration comes up today with a plan to do what should have been done this time last year, modify ridiculous mortgage loans. (It does not seem to address the problem of negative equity ... so far as one can tell from headlines).
All the same, it's very hard to assess the impact of the plan. apart from observing that the Bush Administration may have let up to 2/3rds of "the problem", at least among sub-prime loans, go by, before getting serious about it.
I keep seeing the data needed to analyze the problem in the hands of private groups.
The Congress seems to not have voted / mandated data collection on the "mortgage default problem", just as we've done since the National Bureau was created oh so many decades ago, right?
Update: more evidence comes rolling in
"Still, government officials had no [official] estimate of how many homeowners would be able to qualify."
