[Perfectlap]

Im not going to weigh in on the CAFE standards issue but i just have to quickly opine that your basic assumptions about the cause of the housing mess really leave out nearly the whole rest of the story. The securitization of mortgages and the complicity of the credit rating agencies to sell those securities to investors worldwide was the real culprit that kept the musical chairs game going year after year. It was corporate greed that BOTH political parties enabled. also, if you removed subprime and fannie and freddie from the equation ENTIRELY, we still would have had a once in a life time bubble that wiped out $20 trillion globally, enough to buy China three times over. The SEC lifting capital requirements for the five largest investment banks in 2004 which allowed Lehman and Bear to bet 40 to 1 was another principal cause. Point is the notion that this catastrophe was forced on the financial institutions by the government is false. They were given all the rope they had been begging for years. As Roger Lowenstein famously wrote in " When Genius Failed" its always the leverage that blows you up not the fatal flawe of the investment idea.