...Raphael Bostic, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who now teaches at the University of Southern California, says that if the federal government renegotiated trouble homeowner loans, either by providing assistance to private banks or through buying the loans themselves, it would help put a floor under housing prices. "Everyone is trying to figure out where the bottom is," Bostic says. "People are not going to think there's a bottom if they know there's a flood of distressed assets still coming up for sale."...
