Experts from the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia will address efforts to moderate housing cycles using countercyclical lending policies.

Experts from the US, Europe, and Canada will address efforts and proposals to moderate housing cycles by using countercyclical lending policies.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is everything that both proponents and critics thought it would be, and that’s not a good thing.

The Federal Reserve and all the other central banks have in these days declared their absolute commitment to perpetual inflation. That this is the best policy is far from proved.

We, at last, have two bills in Congress – one in the House and one in the Senate – addressing the long-festering problem of what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and proposing a housing finance sector without them.

Ben Bernanke’s 2012 lectures on central banking as he has studied and practiced it, now published as The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis, make a short, direct and instructive discussion of what is the world’s most potent financial institution, for better and for worse.

Although there seems to be a near-consensus that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated, there is no consensus on what should replace them. History should tell all of us that the PATH bill is the way to go.

Earlier this month, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), along with subcommittee chairs Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), unveiled the Protecting American Taxpayers and Homeowners (PATH) Act of 2013. Title II encompasses the most significant and common-sense FHA reform legislation in memory.

It is impossible to make riskless deposits out of the inherently risky business of banking. But governments everywhere insist on trying to do it anyway.