Conor Dougherty

So Saturday morning, Trump posts this picture on Truth Social.

It's just a picture, and it says, Great American Presidents.

Conor Doherty is a housing reporter for The Times.

And on the left, you have Franklin D. Roosevelt, and above him it says, 30-year mortgage.

And on the right, you have President Donald Trump, and above him it says, 50-year mortgage.

Yeah.

Right off the bat, you see he's trying to come up with an idea that will lower mortgage payments for everyone who has a mortgage.

Yes.

Making payments more affordable.

So I suppose what we should probably do is go to a little bit before FDR and say what the housing market used to be like.

Many fewer Americans owned their homes and they had a lot of different ways for borrowing the money to buy a home.

now one of the most popular models was something called building and loan associations some of your older or film buff listeners might know that during the movie it's a wonderful life there's a fictional company called the bailey brothers building and loan so right basically they're co-ops a bunch of people buy into like what is essentially a pool of money and then they can borrow from that pool of money

their shareholders in this pool, and then that allows them to borrow money from it.

So a very complicated model.

It had a lot of risk to it.

But the point is, is that it's a very haphazard market.

And it's a market that the government has essentially no involvement in, right?

So during the Great Depression, obviously, there's total chaos.

There's a huge run on banks.

Credit is just completely pulled back in various ways.