Who will buy mortgages?
From a friend…
Interest rates matter but a broken bond market matters too. There is a role for government during a market failure, but government as the only buyer over 10 years is a national liability and a failure of imagination.
Bernanke’s defining question remains – what’s this stuff worth? When there are no willing buyers you don’t know. ICE can solve that problem and Realtors can be part of the solution.
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The proposals now competing disagree about almost everything except the starting point. The listing database is valuable because working brokers build it, one listing and one represented client at a time. Every proposal on the table is, at bottom, an argument about how to honor that fact
Arguments about real estate data are conducted in a specialized vocabulary, and the vocabulary is doing real work. These terms decide who may see your home listing, who may build products from your sale price, and who pays whom for what.
That trade has broken down, because some firms now take data out without putting listings in, and others want to hold listings back while staying in. In the summer of 2026, three documents from three organizations proposed three different repairs. Here they are, in plain language.
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