Thursday, October 29, 2009

Treasury Concerned that Borrowers May "Game" Mortgage Modification Formulas

I agree. The Treasury's only solution has been to make the modification formula secret (see Congressional Oversight Panel, October 2009, p. 47: the secret is about the exact location of the allocation W0 in this diagram).

What about changing the formula to get the implicit marginal income tax rate down below 100%? Or even down to 0%?

1 comment:

Tino said...

According to IMF working paper “Sickness absence in Europe” The 3 countries with the highest share of sickness absence 1995-2003 are, wait for it, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway.

https://imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2004/wp04193.pdf
Figure 2 page 4.

NYT readers are smart and educated, but they are also partisan idiots, after years of one sided economics coverage which they think gives a complete picture.

In more recent years Finland has overtaken Netherlands, which solved its bizarre rate of disability and sickness leave. Poland and Czech republic are also high newcomers.