Despite a slow start, the program could soon expand broadly. Next week, the Fed will add commercial real estate mortgages ”” a vast market ”” to the list of loans it will buy. Eventually, officials say, the TALF program could provide as much as $1 trillion in financing.
Fed officials say they, too, are uncomfortable with their new role and hope to end it as soon as credit markets return to normal. When R.V. manufacturers recently sought a meeting, senior Fed staff members refused to see them in person and instead heard their pleas in a conference call.
The central bank is increasingly having to make politically sensitive choices. For example, it is weighing whether loans to people who buy speedboats and snowmobiles are as worthy of help as those to people who buy cars. And it is being besieged by arguments from R.V. manufacturers and strip-mall developers that they play a crucial role in the economy and also deserve help.
Many of the decisions could have political repercussions. On Feb. 9, President Obama traveled to Elkhart, Ind., a Republican stronghold that Democrats hope to convert to their column. Elkhart is also home to much of the R.V. industry, which has been battered by the recession.
Count me among the deeply uncomfortable. Speedboats? This is nuts. Read it all–KSH.
I’m with you on the speedboats, and the other playtoys. Yeah, I know a few people use snowmobiles in their work/business and they could be an exception.
RVing includes an army of people who migrate from the north to the south for winter and then back north in the spring.
Saves cost of heating in the winter and AC in the summer. But I suspect it wasn’t so much the “financial crisis” that has done in the RV industry as it was the high gasoline prices a year ago. The strong possibility of those prices returning make buying any size RV a risky business. The purchase cost of them is 2 to 5 times the price of a car, plus one has a higher cost of fuel, (you don’t put 87 octane in those!) tires, and normal maintenance items. So I don’t see that making RV loans available is going to rescue the RV industry. Time to grit the teeth and downsize expectations
like everyone else.
Guys, this argument is just as flawed as the sexual ones in the church. Subsidize one person’s loan and why not the next? Under what moral authority? Maybe speedboating relieves some person’s stress and so it provides a health benefit that might even be favored under new national health care rules because it might “reduce future costs”. And what about vacation loans? Oh my gosh, those folks could trot out lists upon lists of benefits.
Let in one entitlement and the dike will eventually fail. Mark my words