Yanis Varoufakis: Australia’s negative gearing is ‘scandalous’ | World news | The Guardian
Negative gearing – a tax minimisation strategy for property investors – has become a key campaign issue this year. The Labor opposition is promising to end negative gearing on existing housing stock and to cut the capital gains tax discount if elected; the incumbent conservative government claims this will smash house prices. “There’s nothing wrong with investing in building new houses,” he says, “but there’s something profoundly wrong with being subsidised by the taxpayer in order to bid prices up for existing housing stock.
Source: Yanis Varoufakis: Australia’s negative gearing is ‘scandalous’ | World news | The Guardian
My Mazamet 
Hear, hear. [And that man is my hero!]
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The banks’ balance sheets must be protected at all costs! So it appears. And what do they comprise, in large part? Mortgage assets. Allow them to fall in value and the financial system collapses. An Ouroboros, a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme – call it what we will, but a free market serving the interests of public good it is not.
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Can’t let the banks fail. Look what happened when the banks failed here in the US…the government bailed them out not once but TWICE. If someone gave ME a big chunk of their money & I lost it all, they wouldn’t be so quick to trust me with more money, but when your name is JP Morgan Chase, the government of the United States just gives you money to piss away, and doesn’t need it back.
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Damn right, and JPMC probably took their eye off the sub-prime ball what with them being so busy ‘attending’ *cough* to the precious metals market. Thank god for Hank Paulson, our saviour from those kind folk at Goldman Sachs.
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In fairness, Aussie banks are and were highly regulated so underwriting them was not quite the same as using $20 dollar bills in the loo. Not that our $20 dollar bills would be that useful there either..they’re plastic.
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What you need for a stable housing market is to regulate the banks and make it illegal for them to sell the mortgages they underwrite. Lending used to be good, you had to be established financially to buy a house because the banks keep your mortgage on their books. Now they lend on anything because they bundle them up and sell them so no skin off their nose if the loans go bad when people who never should have been approved for the loan in the first place, when they can’t make their payments.
All that has to be done is to regulate the banks and securities and don’t permit the bundling and sale of US Home mortgages.
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I’m not savvy about any of this, but what you say makes sense. Think of the stability, and the lack of fraudulent repossessions, when there isn’t a long chain of home-loan holders, from sale after sale. Consistency can be a very good, stabilizing thing.
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