Free Republic

After edging out Rockefeller 51% to 49% in the winner-take-all race in California, Goldwater had a huge majority of delegates, enough to easily win the nomination at the Republican convention. George Romney set about denouncing Goldwater, and even raised a stink at the convention to have Goldwater′s delegates disqualified. Romney was accusing many of Goldwater′s delegates as being everything from racists, members of the Ku-Klux-Klan, the John Birch Society and even accused some of being Communists! Imagine that! Once Goldwater was named the presidential nominee, George Romney still worked to undermine his campaign, refusing to endorse or support him. So...

You mention toxic mortgages. How does Dodd-Frank address that problem?Not at all. There is no attempt in Dodd-Frank to address the key problem of government subsidization of mortgage risk, and the exposures of Fannie Mae [FNMA], Freddie Mac [FMCC], and the Federal Housing Administration are still growing. How do you explain the omission?There is a powerful political interest that wants real-estate lending to be sponsored by the government. Starting about 1830, an important influence on the politics of banking came from farming interests, which increasingly promoted bank exposure to farm real-estate risk. What has changed since World War II is...

Dear Concerned American: The Obama bureaucracy is out of control, and I need your help to stop it. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) allows Congress to overturn outrageous regulations like the bureaucratic power grabs rammed through the Obama Labor Board. S.J. Res. 36 is a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that would prevent implementation of the NLRB's "ambush" election rules. You see, this proposal would diminish employees' ability to make a fully informed decision by reducing time in which the process occurs from the current average of 38 days to as little as one week. Worse, allowing the new rules will...

Journalism: Bloomberg News has published a piece designed to shame GOP White House hopefuls for fingering government housing policy in the crisis. But it's Bloomberg that needs schooling. Its lengthy article scoffs at top Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for laying much of the blame on federal regulations. It argues their view "has been rejected" by the Washington punditry, as well as the Democrat-appointed "commission that investigated the meltdown." While true, the prevailing wisdom is dead wrong. And the business wire not only parroted this false Democrat narrative, but conveniently omitted key facts. Take Bloomberg's analysis of the...

President Obama says the Occupy Wall Street protests show a "broad-based frustration" among Americans with the financial sector, which continues to kick against regulatory reforms three years after the financial crisis. "You're seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place," he complained earlier this month. But what if government encouraged, even invented, those "abusive practices"?

Historians know that they can never claim wars start with a clash of armies. They know that the root causes of war start long before. In the same way that the seeds of war germinate well in advance of battle action, so too did the causes of this country’s mortgage meltdown, housing collapse, and credit crisis. Champions of Big-Brother-Government want you to blame everyone else except government intrusion for the economic plagues that currently assail us. But there’s no getting around the truth. In the 1990s and 2000s, activist leftist groups like ACORN, AFL-CIO, and NEA conspired with liberal politicians...

I guess every few years, civilized society has to put up with some new crop of ignoramuses who want to tear things down and rant against things they do not comprehend. No matter what the “Occupy Wall Street” lost-souls think, for those readers who really want the truth, this column’s for you. It is the first in a series. It’s the American way for people to stand on street corners with placards or bullhorns. But with the current bunch, the real question for mainstream Americans is whether the cries of the protestors are based on facts or contrived fiction. We’ll...

In today’s Wall Street Journal: Asked who was to blame for the 2008 financial crisis and whether any bankers should have been prosecuted, Mrs. Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich put the onus on the federal government, with Mr. Gingrich suggesting that former Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, should both be jailed.“It was the federal government that pushed the subprime loans . . . that pushed the community reinvestment act,� said Mrs. Bachmann, citing what she considered the causes of the housing meltdown.Mr. Frank released an emailed...

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a key architect of a law passed in 1992 that set Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the road to ruin, according to a new book by Robert Stowe England to be released September 30 by Praeger. The book, Black Box Casino, uncovers the myriad factors that led to the financial crisis of 2008, the worst financial implosion of modern times. This story is one of many threads woven into the book's narrative. ACORN was a key leader in clandestine negotiations among housing activists to shape new legislation that would...

The Department of Justice is executing a "Witch Hunt" against banks. Through the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Attorney General Eric Holder is forcing banks to "relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination," according to a published report by Investor's Business Daily after reviewing court documents. The DOJ has already extorted $20 million for weak and poor credit loans from banks that "settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist." The DOJ admits another 60 banks are already under...

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD. [snip] Another Reno protege, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference is, he said, bankers discriminate "with a smile" and "fine print." He said this kind of racism, though more subtle, is "every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood." Perez has put...

Community activists in St. Louis became concerned a couple of years ago that local banks weren't offering credit to the city's poor and African American residents. So they formed a group called the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance and began writing complaint letters to federal regulators. Apparently, someone in Washington took notice. The Federal Reserve has cited one of the group's targets, Midwest BankCentre, a small bank that has been operating in St. Louis's predominantly white, middle-class suburbs for over a century, for failing to issue home mortgages or open branches in disadvantaged areas. Although executives at...

Cover-Up: Acorn clones using the Community Reinvestment Act to shake down banks aren't happy with our campaign to expose the truth about the CRA's central role in the financial crisis. The Greenlining Institute is typical. The Berkeley, Calif.-based community organizer fired off a letter to us complaining about our March 21 editorial "WaMu: Guilty Only Of CRA Compliance." In it, we argued that Washington Mutual, a CRA poster boy in the run-up to the crisis, is now a convenient whipping boy for the same regulators who pressured the bank into making the "reckless" multicultural loans they're suing it over today....

WASHINGTON — The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry. The commission that investigated the crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans... While the panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, accuses several financial institutions of greed, ineptitude or both, some of its...

INVESTIGATE THIS!by Ann CoulterJanuary 5, 2011The Republicans are back in charge in the House of Representatives this week, and not a moment too soon! Forget "stimulus" bills and "shovel-ready" bailouts (for public school teachers, who need shovels for what they're teaching), the current financial crisis, which is the second Great Depression, was created slowly and methodically by Democrat hacks running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past 18 years. As even Obama's treasury secretary admitted in congressional hearings, "Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system." And if it's something Tim Geithner...

1.    Politicians had policies which supported bad lending practices.  They believed that not enough loans were being made to minority groups, so they expanded the power and scope of the Community Reinvestment Act, which was designed to get more minorities to buy homes. 2.    There was the problem of minority incomes not being high enough and their credit not being good enough to get home loans. 3.    FNMA and FHLMC are quasi-government institutions (now, fully government institutions) which make the rules for buying mortgages, as mortgage companies do not hold their mortgages; they sell them on the secondary mortgage...

It has been fascinating to observe the reactions of anti-regulation zealots to the film "Inside Job." Many — including Paul Sperry in his Nov. 18 column on this page, "10 Reasons You Should Not Waste Your Money On Film 'Inside Job,'" — have resorted to constructing a sort of alternate economic history of the past 20 years. In this alternate history, the culprit behind the subprime mortgage meltdown and ensuing economic crisis wasn't deregulated investment banks or speculators taking absurd risks. Instead, it was the poor, aided and abetted by advocates like us at the Greenlining Institute who worked to...

As detailed in this previous clip, co-authors Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera say there's plenty of blame to go around, from Alan Greenspan .....

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?by novelist Orson Scott Card, a Democrat_________..      This [financial crisis] was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them...Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It's as if the Pentagon were...

A consumer advocacy Web site has obtained some mortgage paperwork for President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama's home in Chicago. The documents, which show that the couple's mortgage of $210,000 was fully paid on May 10, 2005, are signed by a Chase Home Finance vice president Marshe Craine. The interesting thing about the documents is that Craine's signature on court documents related to other people's homes looks radically different from the version on the Obamas' paperwork. In other, unrelated cases, attorneys for homeowners have accused loan processing companies of allowing employees to forge other people's signatures.

The disappearance of home equity value is a lead weight on the recovery Why has housing been such a core element in the story of American civilization?Culturally a decent house has been a symbol of middle-class family life. Practically, it has been a secure shelter for the children, along with access to a good free education. Financially it has been regarded as a safe store of value, a shield against the vagaries of the economy, and a long-term retirement asset. Indeed, for decades, a house has been the largest asset on the balance sheet of the average American family. In...

"Brad" commnets: Below is a brief history of why the housing bubble burst. » 1977: Democrat Jimmy Carter signs the Community Reinvestment Act, guaranteeing home loans to low-income families. » 1999: Democrat Bill Clinton puts the CRA on steroids by pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the number of subprime loans. » September 1999: The New York Times publishes an article headlined "Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Lending," which warned of the coming crisis due to lax lending policies of the Clinton administration. » 2003: The White House calls Fannie and Freddie a "systemic risk" and...

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...

Democrats claim their sweeping financial-sector reforms will guard against the kind of problems that triggered the recent economic meltdown. But if they really wanted to do that, they would've focused on how so many US officials were simply . . . bought. Fat chance. Nonetheless, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform, is demanding just such a review -- and, for the sake of the nation, he should get one. Last week, Issa wrote to Alfred Pollard, general counsel to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,...

  Supporters call it "financial services reform." Yet one has to wonder what the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 is reforming or stabilizing. The House on Wednesday by a 237-192 margin passed the 2,300-plus-page conference bill designed to protect American households from predatory practices by banks, subprime lenders, brokerage houses and other intermediaries. But evidence suggests that if it becomes law, the bill instead will lay the groundwork for another major federal bailout. During House-Senate conference sessions, affirmative action zealots inserted a host of mandates to promote credit allocation by race. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. Barney Frank,...

They saw a housing boom, they saw a recession, and yet the Canadian housing market is still cooking with gas. Why? Fundamental differences in Canadian banking, borrowing and home buying. I spent the day in Toronto a few weeks ago and was really interested to see how a few miles can span such a huge difference in collective attitude.

For American taxpayers, now on the hook for some $145 billion in housing losses connected to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans, that amount could be just the tip of the iceberg. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the losses could balloon to $400 billion. And if housing prices fall further, some experts caution, the cost to the taxpayer could hit as much as $1 trillion. Two things are clear: Taxpayers don’t want to foot the bill, and Fannie and Freddie, taken over by the government in 2008 to stanch the financial bloodletting, need a major overhaul.

...There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it... -------------- ...But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down. These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had...

In this report on Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) agreements, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) finds that $4.2 trillion dollars have been infused into minority and lower income neighborhoods since CRA passed in 1977. Banks have committed to 430 CRA agreements, instituting multi-year programs covering loans, investments and banking services to communities in need....

...In early 2005, largely at the behest of the banking sector, the Office of Thrift Supervision implemented new rules that were widely perceived as weakening the CRA. Supervision of banks with under $1 billion in assets was loosened, and larger banks were allowed to voluntarily reduce the amount of regulator scrutiny of their "investment" and "service"-two long-standing categories of assessment under the CRA. This had two unintended consequences that would later prove to be very costly. In the first place, it increased CRA scrutiny of larger banks, who were now the main focus of regulators. This put even more pressure...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- DeVore for California today welcomed the overwhelming, first-ballot endorsement of Chuck DeVore by the California Republican Assembly's 75th annual convention. DeVore's endorsement, by a margin of 194 votes to 89 for distant-second Carly Fiorina, was the first by a statewide Republican organization in the California U.S. Senate race. The CRA endorsement of Chuck DeVore was the more remarkable for the tremendous effort the Fiorina campaign put into blocking it. With a 2/3 majority required for an endorsement, that campaign needed to secure the support of only a small minority of delegates. To that end: Carly Fiorina...

Financial Crisis: As Congress crafts new banking rules to beef up the Community Reinvestment Act, the panel it picked to probe the subprime mess is discounting CRA's role in it. How convenient. The "bipartisan" Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission kicked off its hearings this year by pillorying Wall Street. It also vowed to investigate the impact of housing policy. So far all it's done is farm out a study on the subject to a Berkeley economist pal of Phil Angelides, the commission's Democrat chairman. Predictably, his 25-page paper concludes that the Community Reinvestment Act had no real role in the crisis,...

Feb 1 2010, 9:00 am by Daniel Indiviglio Barney Frank: The Poor Should Rent, Not Own In its final installment of the Big Think's "Went Went Wrong" Series on the financial crisis, they interviewed Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA). Much of the interview was predictable: Frank mostly explained what anyone closely following the financial regulation push in Congress already knew. But there was one fascinating gem in discussing where Fannie and Freddie went wrong. Frank views ushering the poor to own homes as a mistake and believes they should rent instead. Frank was responding to the question about...

...Bank of America said in 3Q 2008 that while its CRA loans constituted 7 percent of its owned residential-mortgage portfolio, they represented 29 percent of that portfolio's net losses. [Pinto 2009a] The annualized loss rate from the CRA book was 1.26 percent and represented 29 percent of the residential mortgage net losses. [Husock 2008]... ...According to George Benston of Emory University, larger banks' loans to low to moderate income borrowers are operated as a strategic loss to get a satisfactory CRA rating for regulatory approval for mergers and acquisitions. This means larger banks charge extremely low rates that smaller banks...

The government's move to ease the limits on the securities holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has ignited a debate among analysts about what the companies will do with their longer leash. When the Treasury Department took over Fannie and Freddie last year, one of the requirements they set for the companies required them to begin shrinking their portfolios of mortgages and related investments, which total a combined $1.5 trillion. The idea was to rein in the companies' size and growth. But last Thursday, the Treasury eased that requirement, meaning the companies won't be forced to sell mortgages next...

Hi All - it has been a long time since I have posted on FreeRepublic. I am back and I will also be on several blogs - I am looking forward to reconnecting with the freeper community. In the meantime - I have continued in the CRA and am in my 4th Term as CRA Sgt at Arms. Looking forward to some 2010 election fun!!!

Of all the factors behind the collapse of America's financial institutions during the second half of 2008, few have been as trumpeted - or misunderstood - as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This Carter-era legislation, intended to boost residential mortgage lending in lower-income urban neighborhoods, increasingly has served as a blank check for community groups to shake down depository institutions into lowering their credit standards to reach marginally qualified borrowers. In extracting such concessions, these groups have contributed to the ongoing explosion in loan defaults and foreclosures. Undaunted, House Democrats, led by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Tex., are proposing to...

This is the second installment of a Monday series excerpting the chapter on political implications from Thomas Sowell's latest book, "The Housing Boom and Bust."IBD Exclusive Series: Thomas Sowell on The Politics of the Housing BoomIn recent times, government officials have increasingly pressured banks and other lenders to lend to people whom they would not lend to otherwise. One of the first federal government efforts to change the process of mortgage lending by private financial institutions was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Like many government policies or programs, it began small and grew in scope and severity over the...

Urge a reexamination of Community Reinvestment Act compliance U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN-06), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, wrote Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC and Chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), earlier this week to urge a thorough reexamination of the rules governing compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). “Under current rules, many banks make donations to and enter into partnership with ACORN and its affiliates to meet their obligations under the CRA. Millions of dollars flows from these banks into ACORN in what amounts to borderline extortion,� said Bachmann. “There’s more...

Recent disclosures about certain questionable practices at ACORN, the left-leaning nationwide community advocacy organization, have raised questions about the organization's very legitimacy. But as ACORN rightly moves to get its house in order and restore its credibility, it might be worth taking a few moments to ask some other questions, not about ACORN but about ourselves, and our commitment to lifting up the millions of our fellow Americans who live in a netherworld of poverty, hopelessness and victimization. You cannot understand the ACORN videos (understand, not condone), without making some honest effort to understand this netherworld in which ACORN and...

Did the Community Reinvestment Act—the 1977 federal law pressing banks to lend to low- and moderate-income borrowers—fuel toxic lending and thus play a significant role in causing the financial meltdown? “CRA was not the cause of the crisis,” Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan maintained this past August. Though he had little quantitative detail about the performance of CRA-related loans, Dugan claimed that they had performed better than loans made by lenders not subject to the CRA. Further, he contended, borrowers of CRA loans had defaulted at much lower rates than borrowers of subprime mortgages. Other defenders of the act...

GLENN: From high above Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, this is the third most listened to show in all of America. Hello, you sick twisted freak. Welcome to the program. Is Michele Bachmann on the phone? Congresswoman Bachmann, welcome to the program. How are you? CONGRESSWOMAN BACHMANN: Good morning, Glenn Beck. I'm doing great. Great to talk to you. GLENN: May I say I believe you are one of a handful. Give me a number. I'm thinking five, a handful of people, maybe three, that actually are in there doing the right thing, and you'll fall on your sword if...

Conservative Republicans are capitalizing on the troubles of community activist group ACORN—ranging from charges of voter registration fraud to embarrassing videos of its employees—to revive their long-standing fight against a federal law that grades banks on their investments in poor and minority neighborhoods. The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was intended to end redlining, a practice in which banks in effect walled off many inner-city neighborhoods from mortgage loans. But some GOP lawmakers say it has outlived its purpose and is being used inappropriately by ACORN to shake down banks for money. They want to repeal the law, scale it back...

Expanding the Community Reinvestment Act As we try to shake off the financial crisis, here's a bright idea. Take a law that has led to the writing of an enormous amount of bad mortgages and expand it. Then take enforcement away from bank examiners and give it to housing activists. Sound like a poisonous cocktail? Well, it is what the Obama administration and Democrats are currently stirring up on Capitol Hill. The White House and Congress want to expand a 30-year-old law--the Community Reinvestment Act--that helped to fuel the mortgage meltdown. What the CRA does, in effect, is compel banks...

As we try to shake off the financial crisis, here's a bright idea. Take a law that has led to the writing of an enormous amount of bad mortgages and expand it. Then take enforcement away from bank examiners and give it to housing activists. Sound like a poisonous cocktail? Well, it is what the Obama administration and Democrats are currently stirring up on Capitol Hill.

With all the attention paid to the health care battle, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the president's "Full Ginsburg" appearances on five Sunday talk shows, few people noticed a hearing with an exceedingly boring title -- "Proposals to Enhance the Community Reinvestment Act" -- held last week in the House Financial Services Committee. But the session marked a key moment in the ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats over what caused our current financial woes -- and how we might best avoid getting into the same trouble again. At the hearing, and in others across Capitol Hill,...

The Acorn scandal, in which amateur journalists posing as a prostitute and a pimp went seeking a mortgage for a house of prostitution and received advice on how to evade the law, is a fitting new chapter in the controversial history of the advocacy group. Acorn found its way into the mortgage business through the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 legislation that community groups have used as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities. Often the groups, after making protests under CRA, were then rewarded by banks...

Nothing succeeds like failure. Here's a press release from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition: Expansion of Community Reinvestment Act Would Promote Economic Security and Financial Inclusion for For ... whom? Can't you guys at least finish your titles? I'm imagine in your "Who? Whom?" equation, I'll end up a Whom, but I don't think the end of your sentence was going to be "for Steve Sailer's Family." So, what's in Barney's Bill, H.R. 1479, the "Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009"? - Extension of the CRA from mortgages to small business loans. - Inclusion of credit unions (my vague impression...