and so kenneth ro rogoff at harvard recommends that since some people say, well, but if we lower the mortgage rates, if we bring the mortgage down to the value of the house, then the people who hold the mortgages will lose money. who's going to compensate 'em? and what's it going to be? rogoff has suggested that the banks are the people who ultimately hold the mortgages. instead of writing them down, just cut them in half by taking an ownership position in the house so that when the house is ultimately sold, the people who issued the mortgage will, or own the mortgage will share in the profit, and you get the same practical result. you no longer have a bad debt on the books, and the homeowner's got a mortgage that he or she can pay. and i said in the book, i know this'll work because in, when i was governor in the late '70s and early '80s and our farmers got in trouble, we had then hundreds of small state-chartered banks who did not want to foreclose on the farmers. they knew that they were just having a couple of bad years, and they couldn't pay their farm loans off, and they didn't

and so kenneth ro rogoff at harvard recommends that since some people say, well, but if we lower the mortgage rates, if we bring the mortgage down to the value of the house, then the people who hold the mortgages will lose money. who's going to compensate 'em? and what's it going to be? rogoff has suggested that the banks are the people who ultimately hold the mortgages. instead of writing them down, just cut them in half by taking an ownership position in the house so that when the house is ultimately sold, the people who issued the mortgage will, or own the mortgage will share in the profit, and you get the same practical result. you no longer have a bad debt on the books, and the homeowner's got a mortgage that he or she can pay. and i said in the book, i know this'll work because in, when i was governor in the late '70s and early '80s and our farmers got in trouble, we had then hundreds of small state-chartered banks who did not want to foreclose on the farmers. they knew that they were just having a couple of bad years, and they couldn't pay their farm loans off, and they didn't