I don't believe as others do about Bush causing this economic catastrophe we find ourselves in. Even some on FR seem to accept that.
It just seemed to me Bush was helpless to stop the Democrat Congress due to political considerations and the media's successful campaign to smear him to the point where he lacked any credibility to act.
The 110th Congress was responsible for the recession and it may have done so intentionally.
it was the 1990’s
bank lends to bad neighborhood.
not sold to fannie or fredie.
democrats have their socialist housing program via workaround.
Truthfully, Fannie and Freddy were just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is with little or unregulated multi-leverage markets, like derivatives. They were dealing in sums far greater than the entire world GDP, more than 10 times larger than the US national debt.
Multi-leverage is just insane. Say, you have a dime, so you use it to borrow a dollar. Then you use that dollar to borrow ten dollars, use them to borrow 100 dollars, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, million, billion. Nothing backs it up but that original dime, and all the money is good for is borrowing more money. It is like double or nothing gambling.
However, with this insanity going on, it drains money from the market at amazing speed. Money that otherwise could have been used to support the bad loans of Fannie and Freddy, and in the future still to come, could have supported the alt-a and ARM mortgages, that are 1.5 times the size of the subprime mortgages.
It also sucks money that could be used to buy Treasury bills, that would support Obama’s spending spree, and the huge returns on investments in the nation’s pension funds.
W. Bush saw the trouble developing in Fanny and Freddy, and tried to stop it, but it didn’t really matter in the long run. If anything, he is probably desperately glad to be out of office.