Editor’s Note: This article has been excerpted from a free issue of Robert Prechter’s monthly market letter, The Elliott Wave Theorist.
The full 10-page market letter, Be One of the Few The Government Hasn’t Fooled, can be downloaded free from Elliott Wave International.
By Robert Prechter, CMT
“Who Will Benefit From The Housing Act?”
This question is an actual headline from a national daily paper. The real answer is: mortgage lending corporations, developers, real estate agents, speculators and politicians. The government is also pledging tax money to providers of “financial counseling” and grants for speculators who want to “buy and renovate foreclosed housing”; in other words, it will hand tax money to charlatans and unfunded wheeler-dealers. But a far better headline would have been, “Whom Will the Housing Act Hurt?” The answer to that question is: (1) prudent people, i.e. savers, earners, renters and people who have waited to buy a house at a reasonable price; and (2) innocent people, i.e. taxpayers.
Government action (unless it is aimed at destruction) always causes the opposite of its stated effect. If taxpayers ultimately have to shoulder the burden for all the bad mortgage debt, those who are on the edge of being able to make their mortgage payments will be forced over the edge, causing more missed mortgage payments and more foreclosures.
There is never any need for a law granting privilege except when the goal is to reward the undeserving and to punish the innocent. If the goal were otherwise, there would be no need for a statutory law, because the natural laws of economics, when unencumbered, serve to reward the deserving and punish the imprudent and the guilty. Populists loudly challenge this idea, but they are wrong.
I thought the Fed was created to “help manage the economy.”
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