Your answer will depend on your values and your model of government.

Mel Watt, Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, recently announced that he will reduce the minimum mortgage down payment requirement for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the housing financing behemoths that he controls as their conservator since the financial crisis – to three percent.

Somehow, in all my reading of other people's blogs, I missed Kevin Erdmann, aka, The Idiosyncratic Whisk. My loss. His most-recent post, "Housing policy--please do the opposite," is excellent.

Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber’s “Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit” is a magnificent study of the economics and politics of banking.