Protect citizens during housing crisis

    Congress and various federal agencies are attempting to deal with the housing crisis through corporate bailouts, lowering standards for collateral requirements, increasing the availability of money for lending purposes and perhaps even granting more regulatory power to the Federal Reserve.
    Multiple variations of these proposals abound in the Capitol as regulation overhaul takes center stage.
    There is even talk of creating a new financial-regulation agency to provide oversight of the entire industry. We are left with the feeling that such a fervent rush to over-regulation could prove disastrous in the long run.
    We remind our readers of a speech made just last week to the American Bar Association by FBI Director Robert Mueller. The talk was titled “Corporate Fraud and Public Corruption: Are We Becoming More Crooked?”
    Mueller noted the FBI currently is investigating 2,500 cases of public corruption — up 50 percent from a mere five years ago. Additionally, the agency is dealing with an 80-percent uptick in corporate fraud cases — most of them tied into mortgage fraud and subprime lending practices.
    “Anyone who follows the news these days and sees repeated references to corporate fraud and public corruption might think the nation is in the midst of a moral crisis,” Mueller said.
    We think that’s an understatement.
    Furthermore, if the current FBI caseload is so skewed that public corruption is its No. 1 priority as Mueller indicated it is, we can’t imagine the climate is right for tossing yet another bureaucratic layer on top of an already-smelly pile.
    Congress would be better suited trying to weather the housing crisis by protecting individual citizens and encouraging the prosecution of unscrupulous lenders, speculators and corrupt officials. Bigger government is not the answer to bad governance.