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From page 70 (PDF page)...4. Access. The Agency should enforce fair lending laws and the Community Reinvestment Act and otherwise seek to ensure that underserved consumers and communities have access to prudent financial services, lending, and investment. A critical part of the CFPA’s mission should be to promote access to financial services, especially for households and communities that traditionally have had limited access. This focus will also help ensure that the CFPA fully internalizes the value of preserving access to financial services and weighs that value against other values when it considers new consumer protection regulations. Rigorous application of the...

Thomas Sowell on how government policies made the housing crisis possible Thomas Sowell, prolific public intellectual and the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of America's greatest economic thinkers and educators. He's taught the fundamentals through such books as Economic Facts and Fallacies and Basic Economics and chronicled economic history through such scholarly works as Marxism: Philosophy and Economics and On Classical Economics. In his classic work Knowledge and Decisions, he espoused a sophisticated, largely Hayekian approach, revealing how the efficient spread of relevant knowledge is shaped by our social institutions, and often warped...

Next time when your liberal friend / relative* starts whining about how Bush economic policies caused the financial meltdown and how Obama will save America with his GigaPork stimulomarxist package, hit him back hard with this video. Read on

Government Unemployment Numbers — Not What They Seem The official government estimates of the current unemployment problem are staggering in their own right. 791,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in 2008, hitting the auto sector hardest. 260,110 people lost jobs in the financial sector, part of the overall service sector that accounts for some 80% of all employment. The construction sector shed 899,000 since peaking in September 2006. The retail sector shed 522,000 jobs for all of 2008. All told, 2.6 million people lost their jobs in 2008. And, to underscore the accelerating nature of the problem, more than half of...

ZURICH (AFP) – Two of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, are set to announce combined losses for 2008 of 29 billion Swiss francs later this week, the Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday. According to the report, UBS will announce an annual loss of 21 billion Swiss francs (14 billion euros, 18 billion dollars) on Tuesday, the largest in Swiss history and reflecting the fact the company was one of the banks hardest hit by the US subprime loan crisis. Last November, UBS posted a net profit of 296 million Swiss francs for the third quarter following a year of...

Every time I catch sight of that flaming queen, Barney Frank (whom some have dubbed “The Banking Queen), lecturing some business or banking type from his perch in a House hearing room, I want to HURL! Let me see if I have this straight. And to borrow a line from a Jim Carey film “SOMEBODY stop me” if I get any part of it wrong: Barney and some of his cohorts (Dodd, Schumer, et al) FORCED banks to make mortgage loans to people who had no prospect of making the payments under threat of losing their bank charters; For a...

John W. Courtney's world collapsed at dinnertime on a Friday in July 2001. That's when he learned from a television newscast that much of the $200,000 that he had saved from his construction job over a 30-year period was lost when his Chicago-area bank was shut down after pursuing a failed strategy of subprime loans. Seven years later, the Vietnam War veteran has yet to recoup $85,000 of his uninsured losses from Superior Bank's failure. And he watches in disbelief as one of the bank's former top officials, billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, leads the record-breaking fundraising machine of Democratic...

Most Wanted: BARNEY FRANK - - also known as “Not Me!,” “Uh-uh-no,” and “The Denier,” is wanted for serious offenses against the American People. Frank and his gang are responsible for financial misdeeds which have cost the American taxpayer $985,000,000,000.00 THIS YEAR ALONE! Pending charges include:

Something very strange is happening in the financial markets. And I can show you what it is and what it means... If September didn't give you enough to worry about, consider what will happen to real estate prices as unemployment grows steadily over the next several months. As bad as things are now, they'll get much worse. They'll get worse for the obvious reason: because more people will default on their mortgages. But they'll also remain depressed for far longer than anyone expects, for a reason most people will never understand. What follows is one of the real secrets to...

Last year, forty-three states reported increased home foreclosure rates. Nevada led the way for eleven consecutive months; in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, nearly one in twenty homes is in foreclosure. Whole blocks have been foreclosed in Chicago. Nationwide, rates are nearing Depression-era highs--ravaging working- and middle-class neighborhoods that fell prey to the soft sell and outright chicanery of predatory lenders in the heyday of the housing boom. These lenders have targeted the most vulnerable--black and Latino borrowers have been twice as likely to receive subprime loans as whites; female homeowners, 30 percent more likely than male; black women,...

...From the current hand-wringing, you'd think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards- at the behest of community groups and "progressive" political forces. In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"- claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants.... In fact, minority mortgage applications...

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Congress prodded, even strong-armed, banks into making more mortgage loans to low-income and minority families. Washington enacted anti-discrimination and community lending laws with penalties against lenders for failing to issue riskier mortgages to homebuyers living in poor neighborhoods or with low down payments and subpar credit ratings. And so it was that the modern subprime mortgage market was born. Now, and for a variety of reasons, some two million of those loans have gone sour, and the same politicians are searching for villains. Leading the charge is House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, who is...

A subprime lender with ties to Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards has moved to foreclose on more than 130 homes in South Carolina since the S.C. native went to work for its parent company, an analysis of courthouse records shows. The lender, Green Tree Financial, also was once the subject of a $30 million class-action verdict involving thousands of South Carolinians. Edwards’ ties to the company are disquieting to some supporters of the North Carolinian. On the campaign trail, Edwards has insisted he is the champion of lower-income families. Edwards’ ties to Green Tree also could hurt him with voters...

The subprime mortgage crisis is spreading to a somewhat unexpected place: homes costing more than $500,000. As lending has rapidly gotten more restrictive for borrowers taking out large loans, sales of expensive homes have fallen sharply around the country during what should be one of the busiest seasons for buyers and sellers, mortgage bankers and real estate agents say. To some degree the change is due to difficulty getting financing, as borrowers are finding fewer lenders willing or able to fund "jumbo" mortgages, loans for amounts greater than $417,000. Such loans are too big to be guaranteed by government-sponsored housing...

US regulators on Friday told banks to be more lenient with subprime mortgage borrowers in difficulties, potentially compounding uncertainties in the troubled mortgage securities market. The bank regulators issued guidance urging lenders to work with borrowers, for example by modifying loan terms. Such changes could affect the value of securities backed by subprime loans, which have already fallen sharply following a recent surge in defaults. “Banks will have to work out how to reconcile the requirements of the regulators and the interests of holders of mortgage securities,” said one official. American International Group has said implementing the guidelines will cost...

WASHINGTON -- Market experts expecting the home construction lull to end some time soon are going to have to wait longer than hoped. The chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders said new home construction in the U.S. may take until 2011 to return to last year's level. According to the NAHB, monthly construction starts would need to jump by 21 percent to reach David Seiders' benchmark for full recovery — 1.85 million. There were 1.53 million construction stats in April, the Commerce Department reported. At the height of the five-year housing boom in January 2006, construction began...

A growing number of state housing agencies are developing or considering issuing bonds to assist subprime mortgage holders to refinance their obligations at fixed rates, officials at housing agencies said Tuesday. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency intends to issue $100 million in taxable bonds on April 2 to refinance about 1,000 loans averaging $100,000 each, held by homeowners with poor credit histories, with a fixed rate of around 6.75 percent, an official with the body said.