And you thought things couldn’t get worse on the housing front. The U.S. housing market is in the worst shape since the Great Depression, and now the Obama administration’s solution is to impose new rules that would banish 60 percent of current homebuyers from the market.

The proposed Mortgage Qualification Rules are the result of legislation passed in the wake of the financial meltdown to ensure that mortgage-backed securities are based on high-quality loans. But the effect will be to disqualify millions of potential homebuyers.