Democrats Caused The Global Financial Meltdown

[KissMy]

Much of the first 35% of this post comes from The American Thinker artical: "Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened" The research & add ins are all mine. Much of the last 30% came from a Whitehouse.gov web page that disapeared the first day Obama took office.

--1991-- ACORN interfered with a House Banking Committee meeting for two days protesting a move to bring CRA reform. "According to the Times, "the same study showed no evidence that nonwhite mortgage applicants were being discriminated against."

--1992-- Enforcement of CRA was "sporadic," as the Washington Times notes, until a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study asserted that there were "substantially higher denial rates for black and Hispanic applicants than for white applicants."

Lynn Browne was approached by co-author Alicia Munnell to do the study because "community activists were complaining that mortgage loans were not being made in minority communities." According to the Times, however, "the study had mishandled statistics on minority default rates. When the errors were accounted for, the same study showed no evidence that nonwhite mortgage applicants were being discriminated against."

Frank Quaratiello, writing in the Boston Herald, cites Stan Liebowitz: "My guess is that they were interested in finding a particular result." Said Liebowitz, "Richard Syron was head of the Boston Fed at the time. He went on to be the head of Freddie Mac. They were looking for mortgage discrimination, and they found it." According to Quaratiello, Syron became Freddie Mac CEO and chairman in 2003 and "faced increasing pressure to buy up more and more risky mortgages, some of which the Boston Fed's guide had, in effect, served to legitimize." Regarding Syron's total compensation in 2007 of $18.3 million, Liebowitz reportedly quipped, "Nice reward for presiding over unprofessional research behavior, bankrupting Freddie Mac and crippling our financial system, all in the name of politically correct lending."

shortened per our copyright rules.

Care

 

[FireFly]

Nice job with the links & research KissMy!

I wish Bush would have spent more political capital stopping this trainwreck, but we all know he would have been called racist & hater of the poor. Oh wait - they did call him that![ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNjK4HktXEw&feature=PlayList&p=F068837D71928B3&index=19&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL"]racist & hater of the poor[/ame] Plus they voted for wars & then said it was all Bush's fault 100%. I guess when the media & drive by voters were against him, he just did not have any capital to spend.

Time to Reap the Whirlwind

 

[Mr. Peepers]

No they didn't.

 

[Sinatra]

Great work.

I am aware of the long list of conspirators - but you put it all together very very well.

While Republicans, and a hungry for easy profits Wall St. certainly share in some of the blame, the warnings were in fact being issued from the Republican side and all but ignored by Democrats, whose easy-lending policies initiated what later became the subprime crisis.

And yet, the media has repeatedly failed to follow up on this.

Make no mistake, if the roles were reversed, and it was Republicans who had passed easy credit race based legislation, and ignored all the warnings, the Democrats would now be undergoing repeated Congressional hearings on the whole sordid affair.

As it is, these same Democrats who built the mess, now point the finger at all but themselves...

 

[jillian]

INSANE FREAKING HACKS...

The Real Deal


So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.


Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.


Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.


Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.


The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.


Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.


Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.


Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.


The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.


An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.


Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson

FactCheck.org: Who Caused the Economic Crisis?

 

[MaggieMae]

Oh yawn....there's so much more to it than just the right wing interpretation. Sift through Jon Stewart's joking at the start of this, and listen to Elizabeth Warren briefly explain the history (yes HISTORY) of financial bubbles since the 1700's and why this one was the worst.

Video: Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2 | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

 

[Oddball]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

 

[namvet]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM[/ame]

the craps alone were responsible for meltdown​

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

--1991-- ACORN interfered with a House Banking Committee meeting for two days protesting a move to bring CRA reform...

Greenspan and the free marketeers did.

Link...[URL="http://mediamatters.org/research/200901080014"]Barney Frank and the truth...

Limbaugh falsely asserted "Banking Queen" Barney Frank "created" subprime mortgage crisis
January 08, 2009 3:24 pm ET


SUMMARY: Rush Limbaugh falsely asserted that Rep. Barney Frank "created the problem" of the subprime mortgage crisis, claiming that Frank's "definition of affordable housing was to make sure that people who couldn't pay the loans back got the loans, the mortgages. He forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do this." In fact, Frank has advocated for policies that emphasize low-income home rentals as opposed to homeownership and supported legislation to strengthen oversight over Fannie and Freddie.

In 2005, Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, worked with committee chairman Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) on the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, which would have established the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to replace the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) as overseer of the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

After voting for the bill in committee, Frank voted against final passage of the bill on the House floor, stating that he was doing so because an amendment to the bill on the House floor imposed restrictions on the kinds of nonprofit organizations that could receive funding under the bill.

In early 2007, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank sponsored H.R. 1427, a bill to create the FHFA, granting that agency "general supervisory and regulatory authority over" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and directing it to reform the companies' business practices and regulate their exposure to credit and market risk.

Among other things, Frank's legislation, titled the "Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007," directed the FHFA director to "ensure" that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "operate[] in a safe and sound manner, including maintenance of adequate capital and internal controls" and to establish standards for "management of credit and counterparty risk" and "management of market risk."

The FHFA was eventually created after Congress incorporated provisions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said were "similar" to those of H.R. 1427 into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the president signed into law on July 30, 2008.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

More like your big, fat mouth runneth over time.

--1991-- ACORN interfered with a House Banking Committee meeting for two days protesting a move to bring CRA reform. "According to the Times, "the same st...

Not only are facts stubborn things, they also tend to make Libruls look like idiots

In a nutshell, what was his (Greenspan) economic philosophy?

It's been reported pretty broadly that Alan was a laissez-faire, Ayn Rand, free-market economist. I think that's simplistic. He was much more than that. He was thoughtful, careful, measured, not at all impulsive, very traditional and pretty set in his ways. …

------- FRONTLINE: the warning: analysis: the alan greenspan era | PBS

… Arthur Levitt said, "He was the wizard, and he was the best wizard I ever saw." In what sense?

He was unintelligible. … It was almost a joke, the way he would speak. It was so imponderable, the sentence constructions. … He so qualified everything. The circumlocutions were so complex that you couldn't understand practically what he was saying. And you know, people tend to think, "Wow, I can't understand him, he must be smart." And he is smart.

If you read his memoirs, they're engaging and surprisingly plainspoken, pleasingly so. But that was not how he was. So that was one element of his wizardly-ness.

He was very willing to go with arcane data, indicators that hadn't been widely watched. He was very willing to say, "In the bad old days of high inflation, people were very afraid to let the unemployment rate get too low." You didn't mishear me. I mean, unemployment's a bad thing. Low unemployment's a good thing, but not for central bankers, because they're worried if unemployment was too low, companies would have to pay too much for labor, and then inflation would go up.

And Greenspan would say, you know, maybe we can let this ride a little more, just because more people are getting work, nothing bad is happening, and maybe the economy is so productive that it won't result in price increases. And that basically happened.

The simplest answer for why he was viewed as an oracle is if you take the period -- he came in right before the market crash of '87. Of course, that was a rough start, but they managed through it. From that point on, markets had a 12-year glorious run, really, around the world. Equity markets went up. Interest rates went down. Inflation went down.

So chicken and egg. Did Greenspan cause it? Are we right to call him a wizard? Or was he running the ship in a buoyant period? I'm sure it's some of each. But good things were happening around the world. …

 

[JimH52]

So Bush was president during the worst financial melt down since the Great Depression and it is the Democrats fault. Bush is president during the worst mass murder in US history and it is the Democrats fault. I could go on...

 

[Oddball]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

More like your big, fat mouth runneth over time.

Fuck you, dickless.

And the Federal Reserve monopoly STILL is the antithesis of free marketeering, your obtuse and truculent prattling to the contrary nonwithstanding.

Now go back to banging your pots, Ruprecht.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

More like your big, fat mouth runneth over time.

Fuck you, dickless.

And the Federal Reserve monopoly STILL is the antithesis of free marketeering, your obtuse and truculent prattling to the contrary nonwithstanding.

Now go back to banging your pots, Ruprecht.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwujtBm44Wc"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwujtBm44Wc[/ame]

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

More like your big, fat mouth runneth over time.

Fuck you, dickless.

And the Federal Reserve monopoly STILL is the antithesis of free marketeering, your obtuse and truculent prattling to the contrary nonwithstanding.

Now go back to banging your pots, Ruprecht.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwujtBm44Wc"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwujtBm44Wc[/ame]

 

[Oddball]

You ain't jack shit, let alone "for real", Ruprecht.

 

[FireFly]

So Bush was president during the worst financial melt down since the Great Depression and it is the Democrats fault. Bush is president during the worst mass murder in US history and it is the Democrats fault. I could go on...

Just because democrats said Bush was a dictator, that did not make it so. If presidents were dictators then Obama would have snapped his fingers & signed government healthcare into law.

Bush sent many request to congress to prevent this crisis, but they were ignored & politically unpopular. Congress must pass a bill before he can sign it into law.

FYI - Only Congress can declare war. Again war was politically popular at the time.

It would help if you read the constitution instead of listening to liberal talking points.

 

[MaggieMae]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

Elizabeth Warren has been on countless programs and she articulates well what the problem is. That one brought it down to dummy level so the ignoramuses could get it too. Perhaps you should listen for a change. Oh, I forgot, ain't nobody smarter'n yaw'll. Burp. Pardon...

 

[MaggieMae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM

the craps alone were responsible for meltdown​

Old stuff, been shown a gazillion times. Yawn. Try getting current for a change.

 

[Oddball]

Rebuffed by Fact Check and the Daily Show?!?!??

My cup runneth under.

Elizabeth Warren has been on countless programs and she articulates well what the problem is. That one brought it down to dummy level so the ignoramuses could get it too. Perhaps you should listen for a change. Oh, I forgot, ain't nobody smarter'n yaw'll. Burp. Pardon...

Yeah, whatever.

Bot parties are to blame. The Dems because they're a bunch of know-it-all do-gooders who flunked econ 101, and the repubs because they never met an authoritarian nanny state turd that they didn't think they could polish.

Then, when all their grand schemes ultimately come crashing to the ground, they stand around like innocent bystanders, claiming that doing even more of what crashed and burned is somehow going to work this time.

A pox on both of them, and you.

 

[jillian]

Elizabeth Warren has been on countless programs and she articulates well what the problem is. That one brought it down to dummy level so the ignoramuses could get it too. Perhaps you should listen for a change. Oh, I forgot, ain't nobody smarter'n yaw'll. Burp. Pardon...

you realize they're too stupid to understand anything that doesn't fit their little wingnutty world view, right?