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Roger Lowenstein gives Americans permission to do what companies do every day<\/a>:<\/p>\n 1. Ask for a better deal, and\/or<\/p>\n 2. Walk away.<\/p>\n [V]oluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?<\/p>\n Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley<\/a> recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.<\/p>\n Read the whole thing ><\/a><\/p>\n Lowenstein makes a good case: The specified penalty for failing to pay your mortgage is that you have to surrender the house. And you’re doing that. So go ahead.<\/p>\n By the way, one advantage of this move, aside from saving underwater homeowners from pouring money down a rat hole, is that it will help fix the housing market faster. <\/p>\n If underwater homeowners walk away, the banks willl be forced to take a writedown on the bad loan instead of pretending that it’s worth what they say it’s worth. This will help the bank clean up its balance sheet faster.<\/p>\n So think of walking away as helping to force banks to do what the government refused to make them do–take their losses!<\/p>\n Join the conversation about this story »<\/a><\/p>\n See Also:<\/b><\/p>\n Roger Lowenstein gives Americans permission to do what companies do every day: 1. Ask for a better deal, and\/or 2. Walk away. [V]oluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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