Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
“heedless risk-taking by Wall Street”
Only because they were too big to fail and knew they’d be personally covered.
Which we rewarding them lavishly for taking.
I don’t see lax lending standards or Fannie/Freddie mentioned here.
We’ll believe the government is serious about making those responsible pay for their crimes when we see Fast Freddy Raines frog-marched out in handcuffs. He ran Fannie Mae during the Clintoon regime and made off with about 100 million taxpayer bucks.
The lion's share of the rising cost of healthcare has been due to decades of Big Government meddling. (Code Blue, Edward R. Annis, M.D., former President of the American Medical Association)
Big Government IS always the problem.
Sure it was avoidable if frand and dodd hadn’t forced the banks to lend to deadbeats.
If the dimrat party hadn’t blocked all of GW Bush’s attempts to reign in Freddie and Fannie.
If the media didn’t jump on the bandwagon of the “redlining” story.
If most of the banks chosen not to participate in this ponzi scheme.
Lots of ifs, but it all lies with the democrat party. They figured a way for force the banks to lend creating the illusion of prosperity while at the same time grabbing more control over the banks operations.
End result was that they won the election in ‘08 and have nationalized the banking and mortgage industry.
BS. Congress didn’t set interest rates.
Part of the new narrative for the 2012 Obama campaign, i.e., it is still Bush’s fault.
1. Passage of the Community Re-Investment Act of 1977, requiring lending institutions to increase their risk factors by making loans to those that the government deemed deserving.
2. President Clinton's appointment of Andrew Cuomo to head up Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and his imposition of regulations requiring lending institutions to substantially increase sub-prime lending. Cuomo created regulations which forced the government sponsored mortgage entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to step up loans to minorities under the logic of the affordable housing movement–every American should be a homeowner. It turns out affordable housing did not mean inexpensive homes poor people could afford, but instead, easy credit to buy homes they could not afford.
Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Democrat Robert Rubin, aided by Democrat Lawrence Summers, organized and led the effort to repeal the Depression era Glass Steagall Act, allowing investment banks to use federally insured depositor cash to back millions of mortgages, while easing underwriting standards at the same time. No money down? No problem.
In addition Rubin pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed the creation of mortgage back securities, fictitious loans packaged as investments and sold to pension funds. Democrats in the New York State Insurance Regulatory commission allowed AIG to insure mortgage backed securities with an invention known as the Credit Default Swap.
3. The Justice Department allowed the laws of the government to be used by the combined legal efforts of both itself under Reno and Gorelick, and community activist organizations like ACORN to sue lenders for not making sufficient risky loans to the groups that the government defined as needing home ownership.
4. Misuse of government funding and corruption of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by top Clinton Cronies, Raines, Johnson, Gorelick, and Rubin that essentially enabled a government backed organization to enter the mortgage marked with federal money to compete with private banking.
Regulatory oversight had changed dramatically to accommodate the Federal home loan mortgage activity designed to enable sub par loans to be made.
In an effort to reverse the activist activities of government backed entities and its own regulatory people, The New York Times reported in September of 2003:
“The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.
But Democrats defeated this legislation. Rep. Barney Frank and his supporters said this that is found in the Congressional Record: ”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.
Whoa there, partner.
That is a little bit of rational thought about who spends the money.
We don’t want the sheeple to start thinking about things.
the central problem was that short-term interest
rates were pushed to zero.
Well DUH.
>>I think the lion’s share of the “credit” for this mess belongs to Congress.
Congress deserves much of the blame - but it’s not congress who the Godfather of Subprime bought the ambassadorship to the Netherlands from.