The House Financial Services Committee was supposed to hear something, anything, about the future of housing finance from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a March 2 hearing that was then postponed to March 23. I’m marking my calendar again but not holding my breath.

Check out this Q&A with me (audio or transcript) to learn more about my reporting on the foreclosure crisis. And give a big thanks to the i-Fund for supporting investigative reporting like mine…see its website for links to some stellar reporting you may have missed.

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the archive.

What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable. But the truth—that an entire ideology had been unsustainable—is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. That ignorance begat infantilization, which bred cowardice and systemic moral decay. The only sustainable way out is to reacquaint ourselves and our fellow citizens with the wisdom of asking stupid questions.

Her all-too-true lament is that banks let machines and formulas do the thinking for them, instead of relying on real knowledge about the world and judgments as human beings. But Tkacik says it better than me.

Some highlights. Dig the traffic-bait headlines! See all my posts here.

The New Mortgage Revolution: Walk Away

Borrowers Pay to Refill FHA’s Pot

U.S. Cracks Down on “Reverse Redlining”

Forget Congress. Real Reform Lies With the Federal Reserve

Showdown for Fannie & Freddie

Consumer Protection? Read the Fine Print

Event starts at 12:15, at 1899 L Street NW, Suite 400. RSVP:

http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/our_lot

Here’s my uncredentialed take on Rajan’s point, from the epilogue of Our Lot:

For the financially skilled and illiterate alike, taking on extreme debt became, in many instances, a rational act. At first the troops selling debt were greeted as liberators— because they sure looked like it. In the de cade that began with President Clinton’s second term, Americans, on the whole, were prosperous as they’ve never been before, making more money and buying more things, no small thanks to the larger economic force of the debt surge itself. At the boom’s peak, home equity loans alone pumped up the gross domestic product by more than 2 percent.

But in the real world, that new wealth was proving illusory. Just try to send kids to a competitive college on $54,000 a year, the income of the typical American family. See if you can find a good school district, career, and home in the same place (without a PhD or an MBA). And pray that you don’t have to deal with a serious illness, with or without health insurance.

Americans coped with increasingly extravagant but necessary expenses through trillions in borrowing against rising property values. In 2004, the nation’s homes were collectively worth $19 trillion, $12.5 trillion of which was home equity yet to be tapped. That year, homeowners took out another $1 trillion in home equity loans and credit lines, and spent most of the money to pay off other debts.

Why did so many borrow so much? There’s no one answer, of course, except perhaps an economic habit that has united a culturally disparate nation for generations. Second only to oil, the U.S. economy runs on anxiety—on the gambles of more than three hundred million people scrambling for security.

With her keen eye, vivid descriptions, and a sense of irony, Katz helps us navigate this complex story by traveling across the country so we can meet the winners, and (mostly) the losers….Katz’s compelling narrative implicates the entire financial and housing food chain, which participated in this greedy shell game. Brokers who brought the borrowers to the lenders, mortgage companies that provided the mortgages, Wall Street firms who packaged the subprime loans into exotic investments, investors who bought the securities seeking the highest rates possible and credit agencies that cheated on the ratings. Greenspan and the regulators kept pumping money in, and instead of providing oversight, they just looked the other way. Some acted legally. Some acted illegally. But most of it was simply business as usual.

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, in discussing the roots of our homeownership obsession, proves to be a remarkably thorough and perceptive analysis of the recent housing bubble, how the bubble contributed to the current recession, and what we should do to avoid another bubble And it’s a great read.