Wanna See A Pathetic Excuse....

[PoliticalChic]

Freddie/Fannie played a minor role in the meltdown. FAIL.




The CRA had little to do with the financial meltdown. FAIL.





See #2.




I don't know what you are specifically referring to. Please specifically cite.


You are equating a POTUS (Bush, Clinton, and in your deranged wingnut fantasy, Jimmy Carter) encouraging home-ownership with mortgage malpractice. As if one naturally follows the other. Yet you cannot show any government documents that encourage mortgage lenders to bend or break rules, or to manipulate the system in order to increase ownership.

You asked for it:

a. Congress passed a bill in 1975 requiring banks to provide the government with information on their lending activities in poor urban areas. Two years later, it passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which gave regulators the power to deny banks the right to expand if they didn’t lend sufficiently in those neighborhoods. In 1979 the FDIC used the CRA to block a move by the Greater NY Savings Bank for not enough lending.

b. In 1986, when the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) threatened to oppose an acquisition by a southern bank, Louisiana Bancshares, until it agreed to new “flexible credit and underwriting standards” for minority borrowers—for example, counting public assistance and food stamps as income.

c. In 1987, Acorn led a coalition of advocacy groups calling for industry-wide changes in lending standards. Among the demanded reforms were the easing of minimum down-payment requirements and of the requirement that borrowers have enough cash at a closing to cover two to three months of mortgage payments (research had shown that lack of money in hand was a big reason some mortgages failed quickly).

d. ACORN then attacked Fannie Mae, the giant quasi-government agency that bought loans from banks in order to allow them to make new loans. Its underwriters were “strictly by-the-book interpreters” of lending standards and turned down purchases of unconventional loans, charged Acorn. The pressure eventually paid off. In 1992, Congress passed legislation requiring Fannie Mae and the similar Freddie Mac to devote 30 percent of their loan purchases to mortgages for low- and moderate-income borrowers.

e. Clinton Administration housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, declared that he would expand homeownership among lower- and lower-middle-income renters. His strategy: pushing for no-down-payment loans; expanding the size of mortgages that the government would insure against losses; and using the CRA and other lending laws to direct more private money into low-income programs.

f. Shortly after Cisneros announced his plan, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to begin buying loans under new, looser guidelines. Freddie Mac, for instance, started approving low-income buyers with bad credit histories or none at all, so long as they were current on rent and utilities payments. Freddie Mac also said that it would begin counting income from seasonal jobs and public assistance toward its income minimum, despite the FHA disaster of the sixties.

g. Freddie Mac began an “alternative qualifying” program with the Sears Mortgage Corporation that let a borrower qualify for a loan with a monthly payment as high as 50 percent of his income, at a time when most private mortgage companies wouldn’t exceed 33 percent. The program also allowed borrowers with bad credit to get mortgages if they took credit-counseling classes administered by Acorn and other nonprofits. Subsequent research would show that such classes have little impact on default rates.

h. Pressuring nonbank lenders to make more loans to poor minorities didn’t stop with Sears. If it didn’t happen, Clinton officials warned, they’d seek to extend CRA regulations to all mortgage makers. In Congress, Representative Maxine Waters called financial firms not covered by the CRA “among the most egregious redliners.”

i. Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) shocked the financial world by signing a 1994 agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), pledging to increase lending to minorities and join in new efforts to rewrite lending standards. The first MBA member to sign up: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage firm that would be at the core of the subprime meltdown.

j. A 1998 sales pitch by a Bear Stearns managing director advised banks to begin packaging their loans to low-income borrowers into securities that the firm could sell. Forget traditional underwriting standards when considering these loans, the director advised. For a low-income borrower, he continued in all-too-familiar terms, owning a home was “a near-sacred obligation. A family will do almost anything to meet that monthly mortgage payment.” Bunk, says Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas: “The claim that lower-income homeowners are somehow different in their devotion to their home is a purely emotional claim with no evidence to support it.”

k. Any concern was quickly dismissed. When in early 2000 the FDIC proposed increasing capital requirements for lenders making “subprime” loans—loans to people with questionable credit, that is—Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney of New York told a congressional hearing that she feared that the step would dry up CRA loans. Her fellow New York Democrat John J. LaFalce urged regulators “not to be premature” in imposing new regulations.

l. In July 1999, HUD proposed new levels for Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s low-income lending; in September, Fannie Mae agreed to begin purchasing loans made to “borrowers with slightly impaired credit”—that is, with credit standards even lower than the government had been pushing for a generation.

m. In 2004 Congress pressed new affordable-housing goals on the two mortgage giants, which through 2007 purchased some $1 trillion in loans to lower- and moderate-income buyers. The buying spree helped spark a massive increase in securitization of mortgages to people with dubious credit.

n. In October 1994, Fannie Mae head James Johnson had reminded a banking convention that mortgages with small down payments had a much higher risk of defaulting. (A Duff & Phelps study found that they were nearly three times more likely to default than conventional mortgages.) Yet the very next month, Fannie Mae said that it expected to back loans to low-income home buyers with a 97 percent loan-to-value ratio—that is, loans in which the buyer puts down just 3 percent—as part of a commitment, made earlier that year to Congress, to purchase $1 trillion in affordable-housing mortgages by the end of the nineties. According to Edward Pinto, who served as the company’s chief credit officer, the program was the result of political pressure on Fannie Mae trumping lending standards.

o. In 1992, the Boston Fed produced an extraordinary 29-page document that codified the new lending wisdom. Conventional mortgage criteria, the report argued, might be “unintentionally biased” because they didn’t take into account “the economic culture of urban, lower-income and nontraditional customers.” Lenders should thus consider junking the industry’s traditional income-to-payments ratio and stop viewing an applicant’s “lack of credit history” as a “negative factor.” Further, if applicants had bad credit, banks should “consider extenuating circumstances”—even though a study by mortgage insurance companies would soon show, not surprisingly, that borrowers with no credit rating or a bad one were far more likely to default. If applicants didn’t have enough savings for a down payment, the Boston Fed urged, banks should allow loans from nonprofits or government assistance agencies to count toward one. A later study of Freddie Mac mortgages would find that a borrower who made a down payment with third-party funds was four times more likely to default, a reminder that traditional underwriting standards weren’t arbitrary but based on historical lending patterns.

p. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus launched Hogar in 2003, an initiative that pushed for easing lending standards for immigrants, including touting so-called seller-financed mortgages in which a builder provided down-payment aid to buyers via contributions to nonprofit groups. As a result, mortgage lending to Hispanics soared. And today, in districts where Hispanics make up at least 25 percent of the population, foreclosure rates are now nearly 50 percent higher than the national average, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

q. Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, have scrambled to reignite the housing market through ill-conceived tax credits and renewed federal subsidies for mortgages, including the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan, which recalls the New Deal’s HOLC. Behind these efforts is a fundamental misconception among politicians that housing drives the American economy and therefore demands subsidy at virtually any cost. Our praiseworthy initial efforts—to eliminate housing discrimination and provide all Americans an equal opportunity to buy a home—were eventually turned on their heads by advocates and politicians, who instead tried to ensure equality of outcomes.
Obsessive Housing Disorder by Steven Malanga, City Journal Spring 2009

Timeline shows Dems were warned:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM]Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown - YouTube[/ame]

So you're claiming that the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by events in the 1970s and 1980s?

You are not very bright, are you? Is this the latest shit that Glenn Beck is shoveling?

No, dim-wit....

I'm actually claiming that FDR brought it on by unauthorized inception of Fannie and Freddie....

....1938.

Democrat policy is the seed of destruction.

Too long ago to be significant?

Believe it or not......the invention of the wheel plays a role in the contemporary world, as well.


3.14159265.......

 

[Dutch]

Do you idiots think he went out of his way to cancel the tours? I can see it now: The daily Presidential Briefing, " Um Mr. President now that we have gone over foeign policy and domestic policy the next major issue is the White House Tours, should we cancel them?" what dupes you guys are.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Do you idiots think he went out of his way to cancel the tours? I can see it now: The daily Presidential Briefing, " Um Mr. President now that we have gone over foeign policy and domestic policy the next major issue is the White House Tours, should we cancel them?" what dupes you guys are.

Yes.....that's exactly what he did.

Let me produce the scenario so that even an idiot like you will understand:

The domestic and foreign policy flop-of-a-leader rubbed his little paws together with glee, thinking "what little inconveniences can we inflict on the public....after all, our media will make sure they're blamed on the Republicans."


Think it's a new ploy???


When the pols can’t justify the spending, they warn the populace of dire events if they don’t pass the bill!

a. When the government threatened cuts to the budget of the National Parks Service, they trumpeted that they would have to close the most popular tourist attraction, the Washington Monument.
Gordon Tullock, Arthur Seldon, and Gordon L. Brady, “Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice,” p. 60.


b. “DHS Director Marianne Udow said the state must make a difficult decision: cut money for food banks and homeless shelters for the living or cut money for burials for the dead. The same state that two weeks ago was planning to spend $38 million on iPods for schoolchildren now says it can't afford to bury the dead.” In a New Low for Government Service, Michigan Threatens to Let the People Rot | Tax Foundation


c. How do you get the folks to vote against a bill to cap state spending? “The campaign pressing for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights is attacking Public Safety Commissioner Anne Jordan for an e-mail in which she says the proposal would eliminate a $50,000 payment to families of law enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs who die in the line of duty.” Dispatches | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram


And the one most similar to Obama's ploy:

d. NY Governor David Paterson spoke on the radio, warning that if he didn’t get Republican support, “you have no money to pay your police…your corrections officers…your firefighters…your emergency health care workers…you could have anarchy…” Albany, NY - Gov. Paterson In Stern Warning: Shutdown Over Budget Would Cause 'unimaginable chaos,' Crime in New York -- VosIzNeias.com

 

[PoliticalChic]

From Forbes.com


Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama?



So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?


It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives…but you would be wrong.


The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office.


Courtesy of Marketwatch-

• In fiscal 2010 (the first Obama budget) spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

No doubt, many will wish to give the credit to the efforts of the GOP controlled House of Representatives. That’s fine if that’s what works for you.


However, you don’t get to have it both ways. Credit whom you will, but if you are truly interested in a fair analysis of the Obama years to date—at least when it comes to spending—you’re going to have to acknowledge that under the Obama watch, even President Reagan would have to give our current president a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar.

What a fool you are.....

....and so easily led.


Did you know who wrote the piece...and why?


Rick Ungar is paid to post Leftist drivel.
It should be considered satire.

His tag at Forbes is "From the Left."
Go back and look at the article.
Dunce.


And you bought it like it was on sale!!!!

So everything this guy Ungar post can be dismissed as 'drivel' solely because he's partisan, in this case, from the left. That's your position.

Do you apply that same position to everything posted by someone from the right...

...starting with yourself?

1. “…before Obama there had never been a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion. The highest previously was $458 billion, or less than half a trillion, in 2008. The federal deficit for the last budget adopted by a Republican controlled Congress was $161 billion for fiscal year 2007. But the budget deficits for Obama’s four years were reported in Obama’s own 2013 budget as $1.413 trillion for 2009, $1.293 trillion for 2010, $1.3 trillion for 2011, and $1.327 trillion for 2012, four years in a row of deficits of $1.3 trillion or more, the highest in world history.”
President Obama: The Biggest Government Spender In World History - Forbes


2. The new spending was not a way toward recovery, they were themselves the goal. Barack Obama wanted to expand the public sector to make us into a government-centric economy. He wanted to diminish the private sector and expand the role of government. In short, he wanted to raise the level of public spending in the United Sates to more nearly approximate that of Western Europe with its socialist democracies.
(Morris, “Revolt,” p.61.)

 

[Synthaholic]

What a fool you are.....

....and so easily led.


Did you know who wrote the piece...and why?


Rick Ungar is paid to post Leftist drivel.
It should be considered satire.

His tag at Forbes is "From the Left."
Go back and look at the article.
Dunce.


And you bought it like it was on sale!!!!

So everything this guy Ungar post can be dismissed as 'drivel' solely because he's partisan, in this case, from the left. That's your position.

Do you apply that same position to everything posted by someone from the right...

...starting with yourself?

1. “…before Obama there had never been a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion. The highest previously was $458 billion, or less than half a trillion, in 2008. The federal deficit for the last budget adopted by a Republican controlled Congress was $161 billion for fiscal year 2007. But the budget deficits for Obama’s four years were reported in Obama’s own 2013 budget as $1.413 trillion for 2009, $1.293 trillion for 2010, $1.3 trillion for 2011, and $1.327 trillion for 2012, four years in a row of deficits of $1.3 trillion or more, the highest in world history.”
President Obama: The Biggest Government Spender In World History - Forbes


2. The new spending was not a way toward recovery, they were themselves the goal. Barack Obama wanted to expand the public sector to make us into a government-centric economy. He wanted to diminish the private sector and expand the role of government. In short, he wanted to raise the level of public spending in the United Sates to more nearly approximate that of Western Europe with its socialist democracies.
(Morris, “Revolt,” p.61.)

Oh. So, today Forbes.com is to be trusted. But not yesterday.

Is that how it works?

Tell me: What Obama spending policies caused the deficit to surge over the trillion $ mark? Be specific.

And then, in your second paragraph, you are quoting Dick Morris? Seriously? And right after admonishing against partisan writers, too!

You're a piece of work, PoliticalChic! A totally dishonest piece of work.

 

[Synthaholic]

You asked for it:

a. Congress passed a bill in 1975 requiring banks to provide the government with information on their lending activities in poor urban areas. Two years later, it passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which gave regulators the power to deny banks the right to expand if they didn’t lend sufficiently in those neighborhoods. In 1979 the FDIC used the CRA to block a move by the Greater NY Savings Bank for not enough lending.

b. In 1986, when the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) threatened to oppose an acquisition by a southern bank, Louisiana Bancshares, until it agreed to new “flexible credit and underwriting standards” for minority borrowers—for example, counting public assistance and food stamps as income.

c. In 1987, Acorn led a coalition of advocacy groups calling for industry-wide changes in lending standards. Among the demanded reforms were the easing of minimum down-payment requirements and of the requirement that borrowers have enough cash at a closing to cover two to three months of mortgage payments (research had shown that lack of money in hand was a big reason some mortgages failed quickly).

d. ACORN then attacked Fannie Mae, the giant quasi-government agency that bought loans from banks in order to allow them to make new loans. Its underwriters were “strictly by-the-book interpreters” of lending standards and turned down purchases of unconventional loans, charged Acorn. The pressure eventually paid off. In 1992, Congress passed legislation requiring Fannie Mae and the similar Freddie Mac to devote 30 percent of their loan purchases to mortgages for low- and moderate-income borrowers.

e. Clinton Administration housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, declared that he would expand homeownership among lower- and lower-middle-income renters. His strategy: pushing for no-down-payment loans; expanding the size of mortgages that the government would insure against losses; and using the CRA and other lending laws to direct more private money into low-income programs.

f. Shortly after Cisneros announced his plan, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to begin buying loans under new, looser guidelines. Freddie Mac, for instance, started approving low-income buyers with bad credit histories or none at all, so long as they were current on rent and utilities payments. Freddie Mac also said that it would begin counting income from seasonal jobs and public assistance toward its income minimum, despite the FHA disaster of the sixties.

g. Freddie Mac began an “alternative qualifying” program with the Sears Mortgage Corporation that let a borrower qualify for a loan with a monthly payment as high as 50 percent of his income, at a time when most private mortgage companies wouldn’t exceed 33 percent. The program also allowed borrowers with bad credit to get mortgages if they took credit-counseling classes administered by Acorn and other nonprofits. Subsequent research would show that such classes have little impact on default rates.

h. Pressuring nonbank lenders to make more loans to poor minorities didn’t stop with Sears. If it didn’t happen, Clinton officials warned, they’d seek to extend CRA regulations to all mortgage makers. In Congress, Representative Maxine Waters called financial firms not covered by the CRA “among the most egregious redliners.”

i. Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) shocked the financial world by signing a 1994 agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), pledging to increase lending to minorities and join in new efforts to rewrite lending standards. The first MBA member to sign up: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage firm that would be at the core of the subprime meltdown.

j. A 1998 sales pitch by a Bear Stearns managing director advised banks to begin packaging their loans to low-income borrowers into securities that the firm could sell. Forget traditional underwriting standards when considering these loans, the director advised. For a low-income borrower, he continued in all-too-familiar terms, owning a home was “a near-sacred obligation. A family will do almost anything to meet that monthly mortgage payment.” Bunk, says Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas: “The claim that lower-income homeowners are somehow different in their devotion to their home is a purely emotional claim with no evidence to support it.”

k. Any concern was quickly dismissed. When in early 2000 the FDIC proposed increasing capital requirements for lenders making “subprime” loans—loans to people with questionable credit, that is—Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney of New York told a congressional hearing that she feared that the step would dry up CRA loans. Her fellow New York Democrat John J. LaFalce urged regulators “not to be premature” in imposing new regulations.

l. In July 1999, HUD proposed new levels for Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s low-income lending; in September, Fannie Mae agreed to begin purchasing loans made to “borrowers with slightly impaired credit”—that is, with credit standards even lower than the government had been pushing for a generation.

m. In 2004 Congress pressed new affordable-housing goals on the two mortgage giants, which through 2007 purchased some $1 trillion in loans to lower- and moderate-income buyers. The buying spree helped spark a massive increase in securitization of mortgages to people with dubious credit.

n. In October 1994, Fannie Mae head James Johnson had reminded a banking convention that mortgages with small down payments had a much higher risk of defaulting. (A Duff & Phelps study found that they were nearly three times more likely to default than conventional mortgages.) Yet the very next month, Fannie Mae said that it expected to back loans to low-income home buyers with a 97 percent loan-to-value ratio—that is, loans in which the buyer puts down just 3 percent—as part of a commitment, made earlier that year to Congress, to purchase $1 trillion in affordable-housing mortgages by the end of the nineties. According to Edward Pinto, who served as the company’s chief credit officer, the program was the result of political pressure on Fannie Mae trumping lending standards.

o. In 1992, the Boston Fed produced an extraordinary 29-page document that codified the new lending wisdom. Conventional mortgage criteria, the report argued, might be “unintentionally biased” because they didn’t take into account “the economic culture of urban, lower-income and nontraditional customers.” Lenders should thus consider junking the industry’s traditional income-to-payments ratio and stop viewing an applicant’s “lack of credit history” as a “negative factor.” Further, if applicants had bad credit, banks should “consider extenuating circumstances”—even though a study by mortgage insurance companies would soon show, not surprisingly, that borrowers with no credit rating or a bad one were far more likely to default. If applicants didn’t have enough savings for a down payment, the Boston Fed urged, banks should allow loans from nonprofits or government assistance agencies to count toward one. A later study of Freddie Mac mortgages would find that a borrower who made a down payment with third-party funds was four times more likely to default, a reminder that traditional underwriting standards weren’t arbitrary but based on historical lending patterns.

p. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus launched Hogar in 2003, an initiative that pushed for easing lending standards for immigrants, including touting so-called seller-financed mortgages in which a builder provided down-payment aid to buyers via contributions to nonprofit groups. As a result, mortgage lending to Hispanics soared. And today, in districts where Hispanics make up at least 25 percent of the population, foreclosure rates are now nearly 50 percent higher than the national average, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

q. Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, have scrambled to reignite the housing market through ill-conceived tax credits and renewed federal subsidies for mortgages, including the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan, which recalls the New Deal’s HOLC. Behind these efforts is a fundamental misconception among politicians that housing drives the American economy and therefore demands subsidy at virtually any cost. Our praiseworthy initial efforts—to eliminate housing discrimination and provide all Americans an equal opportunity to buy a home—were eventually turned on their heads by advocates and politicians, who instead tried to ensure equality of outcomes.
Obsessive Housing Disorder by Steven Malanga, City Journal Spring 2009

Timeline shows Dems were warned:
Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown - YouTube

So you're claiming that the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by events in the 1970s and 1980s?

You are not very bright, are you? Is this the latest shit that Glenn Beck is shoveling?

No, dim-wit....

I'm actually claiming that FDR brought it on by unauthorized inception of Fannie and Freddie....

....1938.

Democrat policy is the seed of destruction.

Too long ago to be significant?

Believe it or not......the invention of the wheel plays a role in the contemporary world, as well.


3.14159265.......

Oh. So FDR caused the financial meltdown of 2008. Got it.

If this was such a bad idea, why didn't Republicans kill it during the time they completely controlled the government, from 2001-2007?

 

[PoliticalChic]

So you're claiming that the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by events in the 1970s and 1980s?

You are not very bright, are you? Is this the latest shit that Glenn Beck is shoveling?

No, dim-wit....

I'm actually claiming that FDR brought it on by unauthorized inception of Fannie and Freddie....

....1938.

Democrat policy is the seed of destruction.

Too long ago to be significant?

Believe it or not......the invention of the wheel plays a role in the contemporary world, as well.


3.14159265.......

Oh. So FDR caused the financial meltdown of 2008. Got it.

If this was such a bad idea, why didn't Republicans kill it during the time they completely controlled the government, from 2001-2007?

1. Now, why didn't you address any of the seventeen items in the post explaining the timeline that led to the financial meltdown?

Oh...because everyone is correct and they lead to an ineluctable conclusion: Democrat policy leads to disaster.


2. "Oh. So FDR caused the financial meltdown of 2008. Got it."
Yes, they and he did.
Since you are no doubt an example of government schooling, and are far too lazy to do the research required, you have only one course when confronted with the timeline that I have provided:

....proving that you have a degree in emoticons.


3. If you are ever lucky enough to have an epiphany, you will realize that you have been trained to be both stupid, and lazy.
You're maxed out in both areas.