Replies

I believe it was all of the above.

CRA certainly was the beginning. Another prime example of a liberal program that ultimately hurts the very people it was intended to help.

The corruption in our country let this happen. Congress for either having a blind eye or not pushing hard enough to fix this. Three Presidents who only pour gasoline on the fire. All the cronies in the financial businesses that really peddled all of this not only to consumers but to investors...

and of course the rating agencies who obviously didn’t do their job.

corruption...corruption...corruption...

The best part is Black is posting on Huffington and interview at PBS...hard for the liberals to deflect this.

What is interesting is how he said directly that Geithner and Obama are breaking the law.

But ultimately it was the corruption of the individual who wanted to live beyond his means, who made all of this possible.

These were not desperate people, like those who go into a payday lender. These were not people who were evicted from their rentals and had to buy a house before sundown or sleep on a grate. Buying a house is not like charging a flat screen TV at Wal-mart. Buying a house takes considerable effort on the part of the buyer. Therefore, some portion of the blame must also lay at the feet of the individual home buyer, who either lied on their application (even if encouraged by the mortgage agent), and willingly entered into a loan they knew they could not afford after the teaser rate expired.

There can be no liar loans unless someone walks into a mortgage lender and asks for a loan. And unlike the payday lender, who is competing with no other market, the mortgage lender is competing with a huge rental market. There can be no true desperation on the part of a someone seeking a mortgage.

Black misses or ignores this entire side of the equation. Mortgage brokers were not selling mortgages to each other, they were not selling mortgages to fictional people for fictional houses. They were selling mortgages to real people buying real homes.

Greed, and the corruption greed spawns, were the causes of this crisis. Greed and corruption at the political level, the business level (investment bankers, mortgage lenders, housing builders, and real estate agents), and the individual level (house flippers, speculators, and people desiring to live beyond their means).