Michigan businessman offers an alternative solution to the credit crisis

Michigan businessman Dan Gilbert, the chairman of Livonia-based online lender Quicken Loans, believes he has a considerably less-expensive answer to our current economic crisis, and he’s doing his best to get Congress to take notice.

Gilbert says that the whole problem — the one we’re already throwing $700 billion of tax money at as a partial solution — can be fixed fixed holistically and across the board for just another $50 billion if we focus on the five million American families struggling the most to keep their homes by resetting the rates and terms of their mortgages.

His plan, among other things, calls for $5 million adjustable rate mortgages to be rewritten with homeowners being given stable, fixed interest rates somewhere in the 6 percent range and the federal government subsidizing another approximately 1.5 percent on top of that, for a period of several years.

The result, he thinks, would be market stabilization at a fraction of the price of the bailout package recently adopted.

At this point, it’s hard to tell if he’s getting any traction in Washington, but he’s trying. He’s launched a new website promoting the plan, and he’s been making the rounds with the media.

It doesn’t seem as though anyone in either the House or Senate has taken the initiative to champion it now that another deal has been agreed to.

In an interview of Gilbert about the plan by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Gilbert pitches the plan as something in addition to, not instead of, the already-signed $700 billion bailout for the financial sector.