President Donald Trump recently floated a controversial idea to make mortgages more affordable for families: a 50-year mortgage, which is two to more than three times the current options of 15 or 30 years.
The blowback from this idea was loud and instantaneous, and now officials in the administration are calling for the head of the man who suggested the idea to Trump, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte.
It was Saturday when Pulte floated the idea of the 50-year mortgage to Trump, using a poster board to bolster his defense of the plan.
Trump apparently went for it, since he mentioned it on Truth Social right afterward. But not surprisingly, a lot of people didn't go for the idea, which would dramatically increase the amount of interest paid and the length of time people would make payments before owning their homes.
Financially, it's just a bad idea, but to people priced out of the housing market by a few hundred dollars a month, it may be something they want to consider.
It may be more of a temporary fix until mortgage interest rates go down further, or until wages catch up with inflation.
All that to say, it may not be a completely terrible idea at a time when the cost of buying a home has virtually doubled in under 10 years.
This is probably what Trump thought, but the usual suspects, along with the fiscal hawks, jumped all over him the moment they saw the idea.
“The idea behind the 15- and 30-year mortgage is that you eventually own the home you live in, whereas the 50-year mortgage abandons this pretense altogether and fully embraces the idea of housing as a speculative asset. Not good, unless you’re a bank,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo wrote on X.
“The 50-year mortgage proposal is basically: cut a few hundred off the monthly payment, spend hundreds of thousands more overall. If that sounds like a good deal to you, congratulations! You just rented from the bank for half a century,” podcaster Steven Crowder wrote on X.
Which leads to the reaction of Trump officials to the backlash.
“Anything that goes before POTUS needs to be vetted,” a person present for Pulte’s pitch said. “And a lot of times with Pulte they’re not. He just goes straight up to POTUS.”
Trump loves to say that the economy is booming, but in reality it is more like hanging on by a thread.
And while Trump can use any help he can get right now, 50-year mortgages seem more like a band-aid for inflation and a cautious Fed than a real solution to what may become a housing crisis soon.
