Posted on 12/22/2008 8:32:33 PM PST by Lorianne
“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”
For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.
“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Times continues to behave like the stain that it has become.
Yes, but unless Bush fights back (which he won’t) they win.
They're shorthanded because of the holiday. It'll pick up after the first.
One can hope that when President Bush is out of office and doesn’t have to play PC politics, he’ll take the gloves off and come out swinging.
Actually, no.
As Ari Fleischer once said, wresting with a pig only makes you dirty and the pig happy.
Complete fabrication of the truth. Reality is the polar opposite of everything in this “news report.”
Absolutely breathtaking and jaw-dropping.
But then again, the Big Lie is supposed to do just that. The Big Lie becomes accepted by endless repetition, which is presumably the marching orders being given by the Democratic National Committee.
Everyone has been taking NYT’s to task over this revisionist article today, they are so in the toilet it isn’t even funny.
The democrats are principally responsible. They passed initiaitives and legislation enabling the bubble, and then refused to call it the problem it was while it built. When it has finally burst, they are now trying to shed responsibility and be put in charge of any recovery...meaning they simply want to cover their own involvement and complicity.
...and Obama has been a chief foot soldier and then architect of this disaster. From his days as a community organizer, through his lawyer days, into the IL Senate and then the US Senate...and now he tells us he will fix it.
Well, the fix is in, and its not about free market economy in the US...it's about abject socialism and marxism.
NOW WE KNOW WHAT A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER DOES
President Bush called me personally 112,100,009 times in the past eight years asking me to make flaky loans to irresponsible applicants. I, of course, was happy to oblige him in every case except maybe some of those cases involving veterans. I hate that telephoning solicitation, but WTF do you do when the caller ID says POTUS. There is no question who is to blame, is there? For a half million I will repeat this on MSNBC and for another tem million on CNN. (sarcasm)
Who runs the Times? Is it Mitch Cumstain>
This is just so wrong.
John of John and Ken fame in Los Angeles was railing on Bush this evening. He admitted that the Democrats were hip deep in this too, but he acknowledged that Bush had been President for eight years and had a majority Congress for a good part of that time.
I can’t rail on Bush alone. If there’s any railing to be done, it needs to cover the complicity of both parties. And Janet Reno and the Dems were hip deep in it’s inception.
What bothered me about John’s comments, is that he said that everyone was telling Bush what was about to happen, and he did nothing. Actually Bush and company were saying quite a bit about it in the last year or two, but they didn’t take action. Congress didn’t either.
Truth is, every elected official in Washington needs to be voted out. They were all complicit in this calamity. And Obama played right along, just like everyone else.
Now, can’t we do better than to let these chumps rail on the auto industry leaders. Even Toyota posted a loss this year, the first one in decades. Our leaders in Washington, D.C. really screwed this nation into the dirt over the last twenty years or so.
I never would have believed what we have done with Reagan’s legacy, if I hadn’t see it with my own eyes.
This article is reasonably accurate as far as it goes. The problem is, they told only Act III and a play sure to run four or more acts. Acts I and II star many prominent Dems. who set the stage for this financial fiasco and had the thing going strong by the time Bush took office.
They talk about the bonfire, but forgot to tell us that the Dems. built the bonfire and had it blazing away by January of 2001.
But, as some have said, what Republican will ever step up and tell the full story? McCain and Bush sure didn’t, and if someone doesn’t do the job soon the story will be written and most will believe this was largely a case of Republican’s weakening the regulations and allowing Wall Street greed to almost wreck the economy.
Maybe so. The article is very biased in that it mentions the mistakes of W and his administration, but none of the Democrat's. However, the criticisms of W do seem to be accurate.
The worst thing Reagan ever did was to pick papa Bush to be his VP.
STATEMENT BY PRESS SECRETARY DANA PERINO
Most people can accept that a news story recounting recent events will be reliant on ‘20-20 hindsight’. Today’s front-page New York Times story relies on hindsight with blinders on and one eye closed.
The Times’ ‘reporting’ in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn’t fit their point of view. To prove the point, when they filed their story, NYT reporters were completely unfamiliar with the President’s prime time address to the nation where he laid out in detail all of the causes of the housing and financial crises. For example, the President highlighted a factor that economists agree on: that the most significant factor leading to the housing crisis was cheap money flowing into the U.S. from rest of the world, so that there was no natural restraint on flush lenders to push loans on Americans in risky ways. This flow of funds into the U.S. was unprecedented. And because it was unprecedented, the conditions it created presented unprecedented questions for policymakers.
In his address the President also explained in detail the failure of financial institutions to perform normal and necessary due diligence in creating, buying and selling new financial products — a problem that almost no one saw as it was happening.
That the NYT ignored such an important economic speech to the American people and the complex causes of the crises is gross negligence.
The Times story frequently repeats a charge by the Administration’s critics: a ‘laissez faire’ attitude toward regulation. We make no apology for understanding the concept of regulatory balance. That is, regulation should be stringent enough to protect the greater public good and safety but not overly strong so that it unnecessarily inhibits innovation, creativity and productivity gains that are the sole source of increasing Americans’ standards of living. But while repeating this charge, the reporters gave glancing attention to the fact that it was this Administration that pushed for strengthened regulation and oversight, greater transparency, and housing reform.
The story also gives kid glove treatment to Congress. While the Administration was pushing for more transparent lending rules and strengthening oversight and supervision of Fannie and Freddie, Congress for years blocked attempts at stronger regulation and blocked reform of the Federal Housing Administration. Democratic leaders brazenly encouraged Fannie and Freddie to loosen lending standards and instead encouraged the housing GSEs to play a larger and larger role in the housing market — even while explicitly acknowledging the rising risks. And while the story notes the political contributions of some banks to Republicans, it neglects that political contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac overwhelmingly supported Democratic officials — in particular the chairmen of the banking committees. In fact, even in the midst of what by then was a housing crisis, it took Congress nearly a full year to pass specific legislation called for by the President in the summer of 2007, especially legislation to reform oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
There are many more reporting failures in this story — failure to consider the impact of monetary policy; ignoring the regional nature of housing markets; and ignoring the Bush Administration’s historic proposal to overhaul the nation’s regulatory system, for example. But then a review of these issues would wave complicated the reporters’ myopic point of view that only Bush Administration policies could possibly be responsible for the housing and finance crises.
From Bill Bennett
http://culture11.com/blogs/notabennett/2008/12/22/morning-report-1222/
Meanwhile, while much of this was surely not discontinued under the Bush administration, as Noam Neusner reported in the Washington Post, as early as 2002, the White House and Treasury began trying to reform this runaway train, especially at Fannie & Freddie. Who tried to thwart these reforms? Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, “the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008.”
That was a far better summation than Denny Crane could ever have done! You had brilliant things to say and you said them quite well!!! Bravo!!! Encore!!!
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