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ecently, DC Comics(TM), the publishers of Superman, Batman and 50 other superhero comic book series, :ame up with a bold plan to halt the steady decline it was seeing in its sales: It abruptly ended all of its famous series, some of which had been running for more than 70 years. And then it started them all over again, with new beginnings and new story lines.
It's too early to tell whether this very gutsy move will work, though initial sales of the new "first" issues broke records. But there's a lesson that our industry, and the administration, can learn from DC Comics' bet-thebusiness strategy: Sometimes, when nothing else is working, you have to try something that had previously been simply unthinkable.
For the past four years, our mortgage industry and the administration have tried unsuccessfully to stabilize home prices and prevent foreclosures. We tried new tax breaks to incentivize home buying, but the spike in demand orüy lasted as long as the program and then prices continued to slide. Similarly, we rolled out modification and high-loan-to-value (LTV) ratio refinance programs that were supposed to help millions of distressed homeowners, but to date have helped significantly fewer. (As this column was going to press, the Federal Housing Finance Agency [FHFA] and the government-sponsored enterprises [GSEs] announced new changes to the Home Affordable Refinance Program [HARP] that are supposed to help twice as many borrowers as the last version. But it's too early to tell whether that will be the case.)
When all else failed, foreclosures artificially slowed - first by moratorium and then as a result of the robo-signing controversy. But all this did was postpone the inevitable day of reckoning for many underwater and unor underemployed homeowners.
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