Blogger’s note: You’ll find below that I use an anonymous source to support my attempt to dissect Someone [who] is wrong on the Internet.™ As always, anonymous sources are only as trustworthy as the writer who deploys them. You have been warned. (BTW — I do know that it’s cheating to do even minimal reporting on a blog post. Sue me.)
Dr. Manhattan is one of the McArdle guests feeding the wire whilst that blog’s proprietor is preparing what will no doubt be a never-before equalled work of economic and/or culinary erudition. His is the nom de blog of someone described as “a lawyer…who represents, among others, clients in the investment industry” — a connection that may prove significant below.
Up for dissection today: his post titled “A Modest Proposal” in which he promotes the idea of killing what he alleges to be the lead culprit in the crash of 2007-8: Mortgage Backed Securities.
What’s fishy here? Well — lots.
I’m not going to go full metal blogpocalypse on this, in part because life is too short, and in part because Dr. Manhattan gets props in my book for having written clearly and unequivocally against the vaccine-autism claimed link on his (now dead) personal blog — from the perspective of a parent of an autistic child. That kind of writing in that community takes courage, so this brush with the McArdle empire will be as free of my usual attitude in that direction as I can make it
That said, here’s the passage that set me wondering about this post:
…killing MBS will likely kill the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with no prepayment penalty, which, in the words of Raj Date, “does not flourish in the state of nature.” And right now very few people can get one of those anyway, which is not a coincidence.
Hmmmm.
McArdle Mini-Me Follies, Real Estate Economics DivisionPost + Comments (40)