Ha! Today's Obama/sub-prime Story turns out to be Lie of the Day.

[NYcarbineer]

I thought it was a good summary of the situation. Attack the source all you want, but the fact remains that Obama was a contributor to the economic collapse he blames on Bush.

You have to live with that.

If you feel Citibank was right to deny loans based on the color of someone skin, then that's your right, but don't try to twist the facts to make it seem like you feel differently.

I'm not twisting facts. Obama was involved in a case to try to get Citibank to stop redlining. This pressure on Citibank resulted in more risky loans and foreclosures. That contributed to the economic collapse. Obama was part of the problem that he blames on Bush. Bush tried to fix it but his efforts were blocked by democrats.

That is simply not true. Citibank was never forced to make riskier loans to blacks than the loans it was making to whites.

 

[IHBF]

So the headline should be:

If home loan lenders had been allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, the housing crisis wouldn't have been so bad...

Why are you trying to defend something that is indefensible? What do you gain from that?

You can't wiggle out of this by trying to deflect it to a simple defense of a racist practice.

Here's the point: Obama contributed to the mess. Do you agree?

Snopes is for dopes. Do you agree?

 

[IHBF]

If you feel Citibank was right to deny loans based on the color of someone skin, then that's your right, but don't try to twist the facts to make it seem like you feel differently.

I'm not twisting facts. Obama was involved in a case to try to get Citibank to stop redlining. This pressure on Citibank resulted in more risky loans and foreclosures. That contributed to the economic collapse. Obama was part of the problem that he blames on Bush. Bush tried to fix it but his efforts were blocked by democrats.

That is simply not true. Citibank was never forced to make riskier loans to blacks than the loans it was making to whites.

What did I say in that you quoted that said anything about blacks or whites?

 

[paperview]

I thought it was a good summary of the situation. Attack the source all you want, but the fact remains that Obama was a contributor to the economic collapse he blames on Bush.

You have to live with that.

If you feel Citibank was right to deny loans based on the color of someone skin, then that's your right, but don't try to twist the facts to make it seem like you feel differently.

I'm not twisting facts. Obama was involved in a case to try to get Citibank to stop redlining. This pressure on Citibank resulted in more risky loans and foreclosures. That contributed to the economic collapse. Obama was part of the problem that he blames on Bush. Bush tried to fix it but his efforts were blocked by democrats.

Is this the way he tried to fix it?

Now, we've got a problem here in America that we have to address.

Too many American families, too many minorities do not own a home. There is a home ownership gap in America. The difference between Anglo America and African American and Hispanic home ownership is too big. (Applause.) And we've got to focus the attention on this nation to address this.


And it starts with setting a goal. ...we must increase minority home owners by at least 5.5 million. In order to close the homeownership gap, we've got to set a big goal for America, and focus our attention and resources on that goal. (Applause.)
...
Less than 50 percent of African Americans are part of the homeownership in America. And less than 50 percent of the Hispanics who live here in this country own their home. And that has got to change for the good of the country. It just does. (Applause.)

And so here are some of the ways to address the issue. First, the single greatest barrier to first time homeownership is a high downpayment. It is really hard for many, many, low income families to make the high downpayment. And so that's why I propose and urge Congress to fully fund the American Dream Downpayment Fund. This will use money, taxpayers' money to help a qualified, low income buyer make a downpayment. And that's important.


One of the barriers to homeownership is the inability to make a downpayment. And if one of the goals is to increase homeownership, it makes sense to help people pay that downpayment.

President Calls for Expanding Opportunities to Home Ownership

 

[asaratis]

Poor folks in the ghetto deserve a home whether or not they can afford one or not...........The taxpayers and banks should have to provide this basic human right without consideration of credit worthiness.......

Bureaucrats can decide who "merits" these handouts..............

For the common good..........lol

Excellent display of your socialist tendency.

no, he participated in a lawsuit that required Citibank to stop making loan decisions based on race in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Their decision wasn't based on race. Here's the plaintiff's claim again:

"the percentage of loan applications approved by Citibank was far lower in areas where the racial composition of the neighborhood was predominantly African-American than it was in areas where the composition of the neighborhood was predominantly White."

The loans were approved at a lower rate in areas where more Black people happened to live.

Obama pressured citibank to approve loans to these people. As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes.

Let the record show that these people should NOT have been given loans!.....just like the bank planned not to give them loans.

Let the record show that Obama pressured the bank on behalf of his clients to issue them loans.

Let the record show that after having helped **** up the lives of many of the plaintiffs, Obama claims that Bush did it!

 

[paperview]

Let the record show that these people should NOT have been given loans!.....just like the bank planned not to give them loans.

Let the record show that Obama pressured the bank on behalf of his clients to issue them loans.

Let the record show that after having helped **** up the lives of many of the plaintiffs, Obama claims that Bush did it!

Let the record show you're an idiot.

 

[Full-Auto]

Twenty threads by resident 'nuts over a years old spam email story that was thoroughly debunked long ago:

The rightwing internet tabloid Daily Caller revives this beauty:

snopes.com: Obama Required Banks to Lend Money to Poor People

and the Right goes wild...

...people, please, it's just an election. No need to let your hysteria become an embarassment.

Not worded properly so you could *****.. We have seen this tactic from you low life before......

Fact Obama was involved in housing lawsuits.

 

[8537]

no, he participated in a lawsuit that required Citibank to stop making loan decisions based on race in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Their decision wasn't based on race. Here's the plaintiff's claim again:

"the percentage of loan applications approved by Citibank was far lower in areas where the racial composition of the neighborhood was predominantly African-American than it was in areas where the composition of the neighborhood was predominantly White."

The loans were approved at a lower rate in areas where more Black people happened to live.

Right. So everything else being equal they were lending less in black neighborhoods.

That's discrimination.

 

[8537]

I thought it was a good summary of the situation. Attack the source all you want, but the fact remains that Obama was a contributor to the economic collapse he blames on Bush.

You have to live with that.

If you feel Citibank was right to deny loans based on the color of someone skin, then that's your right, but don't try to twist the facts to make it seem like you feel differently.

I'm not twisting facts. Obama was involved in a case to try to get Citibank to stop redlining. This pressure on Citibank resulted in more risky loans and foreclosures. That contributed to the economic collapse.

My gawd. Abolishing redlining did not pressure Citibank to make more risky loans. It simply required Citibank to apply objective, nondiscriminatory standards. "Living in a black neighborhood" is not an objective credit risk.

Conservatarians supporting redlining...It's like 1959 all over again.

 

[Dot Com]

Fed’s Kroszner: Don’t Blame CRA - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Federal Reserve governor Randall Kroszner, a conservative economist on leave from a teaching post at the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, says the Community Reinvestment Act isn’t to blame for the subprime mess, despite some accusations to the contrary.


Kroszner
“First, only a small portion of subprime mortgage originations are related to the CRA. Second, CRA- related loans appear to perform comparably to other types of subprime loans. Taken together… we believe that the available evidence runs counter to the contention that the CRA contributed in any substantive way to the current mortgage crisis,” he said in a speech today in Washington.

 

[healthmyths]

I suggest you read the lawsuit, because you haven't.

It was a racial discrimination lawsuit. It had nothing to do with forcing banks to make sub-prime loans.

That is correct!
And it was settled OUT of court.
BUT it did leave a strong impression on lending community that IF they didn't relax lending requirements ACORN/et.al. THREATENED to lead protests, boycotts,etc. of any lenders that didn't comply.
FACT to support that are:
But let’s to go to the root of this problem. WHY were there loans that they knew would fail? Because of FannieMae and FreddieMac, our government, and the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act). FannieMae was created by our government to ensure that mortgages were made more available to lower income families (liberal ideas always sound good in theory). What Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae did was buy loans from approved mortgage sellers. These loans were traded either for cash or mortgage backed securities (remember the words in the sign?). Then they can be sold. And that is exactly what happened.

Let’s Be Angry At The ROOT Of The Problem | TexasSparkle | a Chron.com blog

And Remember these quotes???


"Over the past six years, the President and his Administration have not only warned of the systemic consequences of failure to reform GSEs but also put forward thoughtful plans to reduce the risk that either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would encounter such difficulties. President Bush publicly called for GSE reform at least 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President's repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems. Many prominent Democrats, including House Finance Chairman Barney Frank, opposed any legislation correcting the risks posed by GSEs.

* House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) criticized
the President's warning saying:
"these two entities - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are not facing any kind of financial crisis .The more people exaggerate these problems,
the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."..
(Stephen Labaton, "New Agency Proposed To Oversee Freddie Mac And Fannie
Mae," New York Times, 9/11/03)

* Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher Dodd also ignored the President's warnings and called on him to "immediately reconsider his ill-advised" position. (Eric Dash, "Fannie Mae's Offer To Help Ease Credit Squeeze Is Rejected, As Critics Complain Of Opportunism," New York Times, 8/11/07)

 

[paperview]

This about sums it up:

Daily Caller Tries And Fails To Read Legal Documents


On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, The Daily Caller has published a four-part, 6,000+ word series alleging that President Obama was "listed as the lead attorney" in a class action discrimination lawsuit decades ago and thus participated in a process the publication claims triggered the economic collapse of 2008.

The Caller appears to have conferred the status of "lead attorney" on Obama on the basis of the fact that his name comes first on an alphabetically ordered list of attorneys; moreover, experts have said that such class-action lawsuits did not trigger the mortgage crisis.

In the 1995 class action lawsuit in question, Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, the plaintiffs alleged that Citibank had racially discriminated against them when they sought home loans. They pointed to bank data indicating that "the percentage of loan applications approved by Citibank was far lower in areas where the racial composition of the neighborhood was predominantly African-American than it was in areas where the composition of the neighborhood was predominantly White," even when the applicants were in the same income bracket.

According to the Caller, Obama's participation in the lawsuit makes him "a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble" and part of a movement that "contributed greatly to a housing bubble that burst in 2007, crashed the nation's economy in 2008." But both their discussion of his role in the case and their analysis of its result are deeply flawed.

Despite its flaws, the Caller piece has already been promoted by Fox News. Caller editor in chief Tucker Carlson appeared on Fox & Friends yesterday to discuss the piece and claimed that Obama "was the lead plaintiff on some of these cases," adding that the lawsuit is "significant" because it is "at the heart of the 2007-2008 economic meltdown."

Throughout its 5,000 word lead story and multiple side pieces, the Caller repeatedly inflates Obama's role in the lawsuit. In the lead piece, Neil Munro reports that Obama "helmed" the lawsuit as "the lead plaintiff's attorney." While he writes that Obama's "role was limited," he also claims that it was "his lawsuit" and that Obama "sought public credit for the lawsuit: His employer submitted a docket to the court that listed him as the lead attorney for two of the three named plaintiffs in the case." Three other Caller stories refer to Obama as the "lead attorney" or "lead counsel" for the plaintiffs.

The sole basis the Caller articles cite for this claim is the case docket. That document lists Fay Clayton as "LEAD ATTORNEY" and lists her first among the attorneys representing plaintiff Selma S Buycks-Roberson. It then provides a list of attorneys for Buycks-Roberson listed alphabetically by first name; "Barack H. Obama" is listed first. That list of attorneys includes Judson Hirsch Miner, who was a name partner at Obama's firm; at the time, Obama was an associate.

With regard to plaintiffs Calvin R Roberson and Renee Brooks, whom the Caller claimed Obama served as "lead attorney," no separate lead attorney is indicated as Clayton was for Buycks-Roberson. While Obama is the first lawyer listed representing each plaintiff, followed by Clayton and the other attorneys, these lists again are ordered alphabetically by first name. But even for Roberson and Brooks, the docket does not ask the court clerk to provide notices regarding the case to Obama; instead such notices are directed to Miner and other attorneys involved in the case.

Moreover, Obama is not listed as one of the attorneys who worked on the complaint filed on behalf of the plaintiffs. Obama also did not speak or even register an appearance during a court hearing in which the judge considered whether to dismiss the case without holding a trial. Nor did Obama sign the agreement that settled the case.

Indeed, a 2007 Chicago Sun-Times article indicates that Obama did not have an extensive role in the lawsuit, with the lead attorney for the plaintiff stating that Obama was "the very junior lawyer in that case" and "not visible" to him during court proceedings.
From the Sun-Times piece (accessed via Nexis):

Obama represented Calvin Roberson in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank, charging the bank systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods.
"I don't recall him ever standing up and giving an impassioned speech -- it was a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff," said Fay Clayton, the lead lawyer on the case.
"He was the very junior lawyer in that case," said attorney Robert Kriss. "He had just graduated from law school. I don't recall him being in court at any time I was there. I was the lead lawyer for Citibank and he was not very visible to me."
Kriss, Clayton and every other co-counsel and opposing counsel interviewed for this story praised Obama's legal ability, temperament and everything about his courtroom demeanor, even though, they agree, he didn't say much in the courtroom. Many are now donors to his campaign.
​

The story also reports that Obama's "final bill on the case was 138 hours, or $23,000." In an order awarding the plaintiffs' attorneys with $950,000 in fees, the judge presiding over the case wrote that "plaintiffs' counsel are highly experienced civil rights attorneys, who have carefully and reasonably incurred numerous hours in this complex case, and whose reasonable normal billing rates for these hours would result in attorneys' fees and costs of over $1,000,000."

Obama's billing thus amounts to less than 2 percent of the fees and costs awarded to the attorneys.

Obama's role in the lawsuit aside, the Caller's contention that federal efforts backed by progressives to prevent discrimination against minorities in mortgage lending triggered the economic crisis is baseless.

First of all, the lawsuit did not seek to change the standards the bank used to determine whether or not customers should have access to credit, but simply to ensure that the standard used to measure white customers was the same as that used to measure African-American customers. And the final agreement settling the case did not require Citibank to accept any loan applications.

Moreover, as the Washington Post's Brad Plumer has noted, "the housing bubble was global ... It's hard to explain how Congressional rules on inner-city housing caused all of this":
3 hours ago ››› MATT GERTZ

Continued here: Daily Caller Tries And Fails To Read Legal Documents

 

[Mustang]

Twenty threads by resident 'nuts over a years old spam email story that was thoroughly debunked long ago:

The rightwing internet tabloid Daily Caller revives this beauty:

snopes.com: Obama Required Banks to Lend Money to Poor People

and the Right goes wild...

...people, please, it's just an election. No need to let your hysteria become an embarassment.

It's still early, Carb.

 

[paperview]

I just had to add this:
(from the above link)

Washington Post columnist Barry Ritholtz has similarly stated that Wall Street's "Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash" and were forced to engage in risky lending by "misguided government policies." He writes that "The demand for higher-yielding paper led Wall Street to begin bundling mortgages. The highest yielding were subprime mortgages. This market was dominated by non-bank originators exempt from most regulations."

The right-wing media have claimed for years that the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices, was responsible for the mortgage crisis and thus the economic collapse in late 2008. But experts have debunked this claim, with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, among others, stating that the CRA, in Bernanke's words, was not "at the root of, or otherwise contributed in any substantive way to, the current mortgage difficulties." Notably, the vast majority of subprime loans originated from institutions that are not even covered by the lending provisions of the CRA.

The Caller's story is not even original; conservative blogs previously circulated the notion that Obama "helped create the subprime housing crisis" in 2008. And the myth-busting website Snopes.com debunked the claim back then.

​

 

[8537]

FannieMae was created by our government to ensure that mortgages were made more available to lower income families

Where do people come up with these zany ideas? Fannie was created to provide liquidity to the lending market, making it possible for the private sector to create the 30 yr mortgage.

A lot more than "low income" families take advantage of the 30 yr mortgage.

 

[francoHFW]

And yesterday I went through 16 pages of google of Pubcrappe orgs, institutes and websites looking for the facts on this- never got to the end of it. Thanks Kochs, Addison, etc etc etc.. Pub dupes and the Pub Propaganda machine. An un-American disgrace....

 

[g5000]

That's true, or ... They could have given less loans to white people.

They should have given a lot less loans in generally. They must certainly should not have been pressured to give loans to people they knew would fail.

As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings.

Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley were not pressured to give loans to people they knew would fail. This is one of the dumbest of the persistent memes still out there.

The broker dealers of Wall Street were not subject to the CRA. No one was pressuring them to make these toxic loans except themselves. They needed to make the loans to use as the fuel for the derivatives products they were selling to meet the $70 trillion demand for them. And that demand was coming from your health insurance company, your public employee pension fund, your 401k manager, hedge funds, your city treasurer, and many, many more sources. Their demand was the pressure behind the toxic loans being supplied.

And they didn't use just mortgages. They used auto loans, credit cards, and sovereign bonds.

Yeah. Sovereign bonds. Did you think the meltdown currently underway in Europe was a SEPARATE problem?

You probably did, considering the idiocy of your post.

This CRA meme was invented in late 2008 by people with a political agenda who have no clue as to the nature of the global derivatives bubble. They cannot see the forest for the trees. The forest being this was a GLOBAL bubble. On a relative scale, Ireland's real estate bubble dwarfed ours. So did Iceland's. And Spain's.

Most of the Western world had a property bubble, but the ignoramuses seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind to that simple fact. They can't name a single foreign bank that melted down at the same time ours did, because that does not fit their mad narrative, even though that list is quite long.

Blaming the CRA is the epitome of stupidity. It does not get any dumber.

"It was those damned negroes of Iceland, I tell ya!"


.

 

[g5000]

I mean, you seriously have to be BLIND not to notice all the For Sale signs in all those middle class white neighborhoods in your town and still believe this was all caused by the negroes.

What? When your neighbor foreclosed, did you say to yourself, "I had no idea Bob was black!"

Middle class people can take out bigger loans, which means bigger profits for the lenders. They were the primary target, not negroes!



.

 

[g5000]

no, he participated in a lawsuit that required Citibank to stop making loan decisions based on race in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Their decision wasn't based on race. Here's the plaintiff's claim again:

"the percentage of loan applications approved by Citibank was far lower in areas where the racial composition of the neighborhood was predominantly African-American than it was in areas where the composition of the neighborhood was predominantly White."

The loans were approved at a lower rate in areas where more Black people happened to live.

Obama pressured citibank to approve loans to these people. As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes.

Your bias seems to give you a serious comprehension problem.

Whites with the same credit history were being given loans that blacks were being denied. Think about that real hard. Think about what that means.

If blacks were then given loans at the same rate as whites, and those loans failed, what does that tell you about the quality of the loans being given to the whites who had been getting them all along?

Think real hard. It will come to you.

 

[zeke]

I just had to add this:
(from the above link)

Washington Post columnist Barry Ritholtz has similarly stated that Wall Street's "Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash" and were forced to engage in risky lending by "misguided government policies." He writes that "The demand for higher-yielding paper led Wall Street to begin bundling mortgages. The highest yielding were subprime mortgages. This market was dominated by non-bank originators exempt from most regulations."

The right-wing media have claimed for years that the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices, was responsible for the mortgage crisis and thus the economic collapse in late 2008. But experts have debunked this claim, with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, among others, stating that the CRA, in Bernanke's words, was not "at the root of, or otherwise contributed in any substantive way to, the current mortgage difficulties." Notably, the vast majority of subprime loans originated from institutions that are not even covered by the lending provisions of the CRA.

The Caller's story is not even original; conservative blogs previously circulated the notion that Obama "helped create the subprime housing crisis" in 2008. And the myth-busting website Snopes.com debunked the claim back then.

​

I have been saying this for two days.

Just like someone blaming The Ameri Dream downpayment assistance program. That program was for FHA loans. Because FHA allows 100% of the downpayment to be a gift.
And eventually FHA disallowed this approach.

But FHA didn't get into major difficulties with their loans. FHA has always been for first time buyers, low down payment buyers, a little troubled credit and such. The mortgage backed securities that failed were not full of FHA loans.