I am professor of economics at New York University and co-Director of the Center for Experimental Social Science. My research interests include economic theory, psychology and economics (including neuroeconomics), household finance, and the economics of residential real estate finance Click Here. This last field is particularly exciting at the moment. I have been writing about defects in the U.S. housing finance market for some fifteen years Click Here. Now that the problems have burst out into the open, there is finally a chance for reform. The reforms that I been proposing, which involve sharing of equity, have recently gained wide attention, as detailed herein Click Here. Unfortunately, rather than adopt innovative policies involving large scale renegotiation, policy makers are taking expensive and ineffective half measures. The policies that were employed during the Bush administration, and those that appear to be impending from the current administration, are nothing short of tragic in their failure to address the housing problem head on. Unless there is a rapid change in direction, I fear that we will stumble into a major economic and political crisis as problems of default, foreclosure, and even homelessness spread deep into the middle class. Failure to address housing-related problems will also ensure the need for many more "stimulus" packages due to the continued problems relating to insolvency of financial institutions and of households.