Free Republic

Subprime 2.0: In an orchestrated assault on the credit standards underpinning mortgages, no fewer than four Obama agencies have gone to war against FICO. If politicians don't want another bank crisis, they'll stop the attack. Home loan approvals hinge on FICO credit scores. But the Obama regime views FICO scoring as too strict, cutting off millions of low-income minorities and immigrants from mortgages. So it's pressuring Fannie and Freddie, which control 90% of the mortgage market and set the underwriting standards for the entire mortgage industry, to abandon FICO for a softer standard in evaluating credit risk. Obama's regulators look...

President Barack Obama is bringing the subprime-mortgage crisis back, fueled by the progressives' political urge to treat borrowed money loans as a "right" that everyone is "entitled" to get, and by the willingness to dismiss mathematical probability as a racist conspiracy. The last time liberals ran this mortgage ponzi-scheme, from 1995 to 2007, they almost crashed the financial system of the entire planet. They managed to largely evade responsibility by pinning the blame on their junior partners -- the banks, the stock-market and the GOP -- and even found political profit in the ensuing panic, so why shouldn't President Obama...

Fannie Mae, the federally sanctioned mortgage giant, has just announced a new program that shows that they learned absolutely nothing from the last real estate meltdown. This new program, called "HomeReady" in a fit of hopeful and wishful thinking, reduces loan underwriting standards. It's designed to allow "underserved" individuals the opportunity to buy a home - focused primarily on low-income and minority borrowers. Other than the last group of under qualified borrower-friendly loans and regulations from the mid-2000s, it's the stupidest real estate loan idea that I've ever seen. The new loan "features" reduced credit score requirements and allows borrowed...

Subprime 2.0: The White House is rolling out a new low-income mortgage program that for the first time lets lenders qualify borrowers by counting income from nonborrowers living in the household. What could go wrong? The HomeReady program is offered through Fannie Mae, which is now controlled by Obama's old Congressional Black Caucus pal Mel Watt. It replaces the bankrupted mortgage giant's notorious old subprime program, MyCommunityMortgage. In case renaming the subprime product fails to fool anybody, the affordable-housing geniuses in the administration have re-termed "subprime," a dirty word since the mortgage bust, "alternative."

Remember a few years ago, when the American housing market collapsed as a direct result of government policies that—in the name of racial justice—pressured banks to approve mortgage loans for massive numbers of underqualified nonwhite applicants? Remember how that collapse set in motion the financial crisis that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama repeatedly called “the worst economy since the Great Depression”? And remember how Obama—who had long been a leading proponent of precisely the policies that had triggered the crisis—cast himself as the savior who was going to restore fiscal sanity and untangle the whole big mess? Well, now Savior Obama...