One of the main aims of federal housing policy has been to make possible the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, a peculiar financial device that wouldn’t survive a day in the economic wild. What lender in their right mind would hand out thirty-year loans on fixed terms to virtually anybody with a job? But the federal government backed those mortgages and made the interest payments on them into large tax deductions, and so they became the cornerstone of the American housing market.
