A Suspense of Mortgage

Italy, having placed sixty million under quarantine, takes a step to help make sure they don't thereby become homeless.

6 comments:

MikeD said...

You know, I have trouble being upset by this. With the government mandating a quarantine, I think it's responsible for them to defer the accumulation of debt by those forced to not go out in public (which very well can include work).

Grim said...

I wasn’t suggesting that you be upset.

E Hines said...

The other side of that coin is what will the Italian government do to maintain the fiscal soundness of the lenders who now are denied their income.

I'm reminded of Congressman James Madison's concern about government welfare:

Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

We're wealthy enough today that we can afford to be less stiff-necked about government-done charity, and maybe Italy is, too. It's still a dangerous slope down which to start: every cause has "good and sound reasons" for tax-funded charity.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

There’s a general problem with the economy effectively shutting down due to a disease that is no one’s fault (not even the Romans). Quarantined people can’t always work from home. Bankers depend on being paid too. But if the workers can’t pay, well, the banks aren’t getting paid anyway.

So the ordinary process would be to foreclose. But now we’ve got 60 Million people in quarantine. That’s a lot of foreclosures, and a huge glut on the real estate market when the banks try to sell the homes (which are probably also going to take a hit in value for having been recently used as a quarantine zone). The banks lose either way.

It seems to me sensible to try to preserve the public health through a quarantine; property ownership through a mortgage holiday; and to make it up to the banks on the other side. They probably have more to gain in the long term by having the mortgages preserved, which provides income for decades, than by having a giant glut of real estate to try and sell at the same time as everyone else.

ymarsakar said...

So humans think it is a good idea to keep farming loosch/fear for their dark gods, is that it?

No wonder they don't even realize they were born slaves and by their own free will, entered slavery.

This quarantine is not the best in grade solution to anything. They are basically panicking, because their best scientism to date, virology, can only promise a vaccine in 10-12 months, and that is with human testing.

If virology and vaccines were as advanced as China's bio weapons... they would already have a vaccine for their bio weapon. They are not engineeing anything. They are just putting chemicals randomly together and seeing which one kills a human faster.

The actual progress of what they call the "virus" isn't even all that important, compared to the secondary triggers.

While this topic was discussed before, the flu fatalites were brought up. That is a point, but only because the media are told to farm the fear by stoking the fear through shocking the livestock some more to tank the markets. What people didn't discuss is that C whatever was infectious even during the 2+ week incubation period. And it still had a relatively higher fatality. What kind of "virus" has that combination? None, that the experts know of.

Generally if it takes you 14 days to become infectious, you should either already be dead of it or your body would have bullet proofed itself. The fact that it isn't working is because...

MikeD said...

It seems to me sensible to try to preserve the public health through a quarantine; property ownership through a mortgage holiday; and to make it up to the banks on the other side. They probably have more to gain in the long term by having the mortgages preserved, which provides income for decades, than by having a giant glut of real estate to try and sell at the same time as everyone else.

This exactly. In fact, I think they'd be at actual risk of seeing the value of the foreclosed homes drop below the value of the mortgages. Think of the days when banks would foreclose on a family farm and the neighbors would show up to the auction and refuse to bid on the farm against the family who was foreclosed upon. Mortgage has been discharged, and the family paid what they could (obviously less than they owed on the mortgage) but got their farm back.