Bush: "Ah am the decider. Ah choose the person."
Congress: "Oh no you don't."
Bush: "DADDY!!!!"

Bad, bad, bad, and bad! If anything let the government create a new info campaign to help people fix their finances, but PLEASE no more positions! This is like too many cooks in the kitchen and as mentioned these guys have no real power to do anything other than do press releases. It's a shame people got too excited and over extended themselves (I will admit, I'm doing fine but I never would have gotten my 30yr loan 16 months ago if I tried today), but the machine that is the federal government can ONLY make things worse.

That night...:

Bush: Laura, nobody likes me anymore.
Laura: Of course they don't honey. When you go to work, even I don't like you. Have you seen the approval ratings lately?
Bush: **goes in corner and cries like a 5 year old daddy's boy**

Because what we really need in this country is more inept bureaucrats paid by the taxpayers.

I'd be more impressed if our leaders could take action before the shit hits the fan, rather than make noise afterward. Who's going to step up and fix Social Security and Medicare while we still have a few decades to work with?

@Myron: Agreed. And I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to have to say the same people who have fixed it so far. No one.

Sign me up...when can I apply for the position. Sounds like it's going to be another wasteful high paying government that will go to cronies in whatever administration is in power...resulting in no benefit to the "American People" as the politicians remind us who we are all of the time. Unfortunately, we are all going have to take our lumps for the "fraudsters" who sabotaged the mortgage industry by conspiracy...executives of major corporations and small business owners alike...and they should meet their fates with FBI investigations and resulting court decisions. As far as the poor homeowners--- "caveat emptor"---let the buyer beware and no one is going to tell me that they did not know that they misstated their income on applicaions or that they did not know that they were signing 2 year arm agreements. And the rest of us...the housing values will settle back to those of 2001...the over-the-top equity in houses was not caused by peoples income rising... it has remained flat; it was not caused by supply and demand...there were sufficient homes for sale; it was caused by mortgage programs that were ill-conceived and there was absolutely no due diligence by lenders when underwriting applications. My suggestion: everyone who originates or is involved in the mortgage industry should be required to take the series 7 exam by the end of 2008 and series 63 the close of 2009. This will wipe out 65% of the incompetent people in the industry because they will not be able to pass this test. Then the rest of us will be able operate with the "fraudsters" out of the market and to offer proper financial products to meet our clients short term and long term financial goals as part of a well thought out and appropriate financial plan. It appears that the only people who are not licensed when dealing with financial products are mortgage orignators and politicians.

Democrats want to expand the federal government!? Really?! That's unprecedented~!!!~!

What on earth does Congress think this dude will be able to do? Absolutely nothing. I'm sick of the pandering.

So here we go. Another bureaucracy that gets forced through for PR and ends up being totally entrenched.

Eventually we'll all complain about how it doesn't work, but no one will have the guts to cut the positions and eliminate the waste.

Why is everyone making Angelo Mozilo out to be such a bad guy? Mozilo is only doing what every other CEO would do just prior to retiring, cashing out his stock options. The man is 70 years old and had planned on retiring this year for quite a while. A real bad guy is Roland Arnall who had a history of bad business with Long Beach Bank, Ameriquest and Argent. However, Mr. Arnall is untouchable since he had Bush appoint him ambassador to Belgium last year after naming his wife CEO of Ameriquest, I guess he saw this coming. We coud do far worse than Mozilo as mortgage czar.

@bigcityloans: riiiiight, b/c no one with a series 7 or a series 63 ever violates the law.

it's easy to blame this one on brokers & borrowers, but the truth is that people at the banks created the subprime niche & made a good dime hiding these nonconforming loans in the security portfolios that they sold to investors. if investors weren't so money hungry for those extra couple points, the industry wouldn't have bags full of money to shell out to anybody that could pick up a pen & this never would've happened.

woulda, coulda, shoulda...whatever. imho, this is a case of an entire industry full of people cashing in at every opportunity & ever level. capitalism at its very best.

Maybe we can lump this sub-prime mortgage issue under a "Protecting-people-from-their-own-stupidity" czar?

America is great because it gives you the freedom to succeed or fail. You take away the ability to fail and you take away the ability to succeed.

Not to worry. All this time we have had energy czars and not a thing have they ever done that was concrete and useful. Subprime mortgage holders are still in deep fertilizer, appointed decorative overpaid crony or not. Unless they go dig up Rasputin.