Mortgage Lending Crisis -- Still & Yet

A few days ago we featured a story from the Washington Post. It's title was "Bush to Expand Help on Mortgages."

How we wish that were true. What's really happening on that front is (1) The Secretary of HUD has resigned ... resigned among many charges of ethics violations. His written statement, of course, said ... you guessed it! ... oh me/oh my/my family needs me.

(2) It's not "just" ethics charges; rather it's also the shame of it. Secretary Alphonso Jackson was warned a year ago that this mortgage crisis was looming, and he ignored it. See stories: HUD Chief Inattentive to Crisis, say Critics from the Washington Post and MSNBC, and also Jackson ignored Crisis by the blog ThinkProgress.

Then, just to complicate things, the lenders have now turned to punishing those of us who pay their mortgages on time and who pay their mortgages on time. See "Credit Crisis May Leave You Cut Off". For those of us who weathered the farm crisis, we remember what it means to be cash poor. We had hoped those days were behind us.