How about Phil Gramm? How about an administation that did nothing for eight years? Baby, the American People believe, by something like 82%, that these miscreants at AIG not only deserve no bonus, they should be doing time for their greed screwing the system for the rest of us.
That would be IGNORING the 3 times that Bush and McCain tried to put the breaks on and Dodd and Frank prevented him. But hey you keep reciting your tired old lies, maybe some dumb shit will actually believe you.
And then ugly reality shows what a dumb shit you truly are;
October 23, 2008
By Keith Koffler
Roll Call Staff
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President Bush during his first term aggressively sought to loosen mortgage loan qualification standards for first-time homebuyers, seeking to reduce or even eliminate down payments for those who might otherwise have trouble affording their loans.
The White House has pushed back hard against charges that Bush policies led to the current financial crisis, pointing the finger squarely at Congressional Democrats for refusing to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Bush’s own efforts to increase homeownership among those who could least afford it — an initiative ardently backed by many Democrats — added risk into the system that contributed to the current problem, critics say.
“Politicians in general and Bush in particular all grossly overestimated the benefit of encouraging homeownership by younger and low-income people,” said Joseph Gyourko, chairman of the Wharton Real Estate Department and director of the Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center. “I think it did lead to some unwise decisions. Equity is, at the end of the day, the only thing that disciplines any investment.”
The inability of millions of homebuyers to afford their loans is at the center of the current financial and economic crisis, which has featured the downfall of major banks that lent to the wrong people and the demise of storied Wall Street brokerage houses that traded in mortgage-backed securities. While many other factors played a role in concocting the current economic mess — including deceptive practices by certain lenders — the failure of many consumers to estimate what they could afford and the assumption prices would just keep going up is a critical part of the equation.
Bush’s efforts to increase homeownership became the core of the “ownership society” that he sought to promote as he ramped up his 2004 re-election bid. Bush pitched the idea as a way to strengthen the country by making people a part of its success.
“The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country," he said in June 2004.
The homeownership campaign was particularly geared toward blacks and Latinos, groups with lower-than-average incomes who — especially in the case of Latinos — the president was hoping to attract to his reelection bid.
Experts Fault BushÂ’s Mortgage Strategy - Roll Call