Both sides need to grow the **** up and start joining the dots instead of constantly lying about the other side being responsible.
Americans themselves, our politicians, our banks... all responsible. Your fault. Own it. Stop bitching and force your side to work WITH the other side to fix it.
Or... carry on lying to yourselves, allowing your media to lie to you and for you, and accept your politicians are a clusterfucked corrupt bunch of assclowns who should be in prison.
Sounds like a typical Liberal... When faced with having to admit that their party was responsible, blames the other side as well.
Both sides ARE responsible.
While the Democrats were resisting Bush's attempt to get the GSEs to reduce their portfolios, Bush was reducing the size of the SEC. While Bush radically increased the size of government, he only shrank two agencies. The SEC and the EPA. There are assholes who try to reach all the way back to Carter to blame this crash on, but would never entertain the idea of Bush having any culpability for the Gulf oil spill.
Bush's reduced SEC waived the capital reserve requirements for the five biggest broker-dealers in New York. A mistake which was far more devastating to our economy than the collapse of the GSEs.
And it was the GOP which pushed for the elimination of regulations governing financial derivatives, and they succeeded with the FSMA and the CFMA, usurping states rights in the process. They actually thought exempting banks from GAMBLING and BUCKET SHOP regulations was a good thing to do! Why does a BANK need to be exempt from GAMING and BUCKET SHOP laws? Hmmm...
Let's let banks be casinos and not have any capital reserves to back up their bets.
Brilliant!
But hey, let's blame it all on the CRA instead. Only someone profoundly ignorant of reality would say this.
The GSEs were less than 50 percent of the secondary market during the height of the boom. And Lehman, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, AIG, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were not subject to the CRA. Not one.
They developed their own subprime mortgage supply chains. No one had to push any bank to make subprime loans during this period. It was the banks doing all the pulling, while the politicians got to take credit for more loans being made to negroes. But you are a blithering idiot if you didn't notice that loans to EVERYONE were up. Subprime loans were made to every income class, not just lower income.
Around the world. This was global. And this was not just mortgages. It was every asset class under the sun, including sovereign debt. You know...loans to Greece. Entire nations were subprime borrowers.