Description: This essay argues against the securitization of residential mortgages. The originating lending institution should have significant skin in the game when it makes a loan, but the securitization process removes this important financial control.

Description: The world of the local S&Ls, the partner-owned investment bank and Bretton Woods isn’t coming back. So what does that leave us to do next? Part of me is persuaded by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that existence gets progressively more and more disordered with the passage of time, since any work done to address the current crisis expends more energy and causes more disorder than it fixes.