From the Charlotte Business Journal:
"BB&T Corp. Chief Executive John Allison is calling for short-term fixes and long-term reforms to address the financial crisis.
. . .
His views are influential because he leads a bank that has weathered the financial crisis better than many, in the eyes of industry analysts. This week, BB&T (NYSE:BBT) reported profits of $358 million in the third quarter, down 19 percent from a year ago.
. . .
The only way to solve the fundamental problem weighing down the economy, he suggested, is to clear the nation’s housing market of its inventory of unsold homes. To do that, he proposed a 10 percent tax credit for buyers on all real estate transactions for a limited period of time. The credit would apply only to houses that already existed as of a certain date.
The housing market generally remains overvalued, Allison said, so such a tax credit could move buyers into the market quickly at prices both they and sellers would accept. He suggested that would be a better use of the $750 billion Congress recently set aside to buy toxic mortgage assets from the lenders themselves.
Longer term, he said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated once the market has corrected, and Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. policies should be reformed to encourage more responsible behavior by lenders and borrowers".
2 comments:
This is a really good idea.
i like Allison, he called out Treasury a few weeks ago as "totally dominated by Wall Street investment bankers" who "cannot be relied on to objectively assess" the impact of government policy on the financial industry.
gotta dig that.
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