Saturday, August 18, 2012

Federal Guarantees Should Be Added To The Budget


This thought has been around but the media never expands its importance.

Marvin Phaup, a research scholar at George Washington University who examined federal budgeting, is the one who is pushing the concept, which I feel is valid.

As an expert on government guarantees, he feels that government bailout costs ought to be measured and should appear in the budget. We ought to budget for possible losses on the tremendous amounts we guarantee everyone.

Mr. Phaup was the researcher at the Congressional Budget Office who in 1996 made the initial effort to assign a value to the implied federal guarantee backing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Had we done this we would have been far better prepared to meet the resolution of the financial meltdown. And to realize the extent of the risk we were taking with the mortgage markets and in other areas. (See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments.)

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