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Deborah8050 commented on Bloomberg: 'Plain and simple,' Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks

The fault for the mortgage crisis rests specifically with Bill Clinton and secondarily with the Democratic party. On April 6, 1998, Andrew Cuomo, then Secretary for HUD under Bill Clinton, held a press conference in which he actually bragged about the Clinton Administration bringing lawsuits against banks under the Fair Housing Act claiming they were "discriminating" against low income minorities because they refused mortgages to African-Americans at a rate that was twice that of whites. This the Administration and HUD and the Justice Department viewed as discimination and won several lawsuits against banks forcing them to change their lending practices and make billions of dollars available for applicants who lacked the necessary credit worthiness to acquire mortgages otherwise. Cuomo even admitted they expected a "higher default rate" among these loans, but the federal government under Clinton forced banks to make these loans anyway. So when it comes to blame, the buck stops squarely with Bill Clinton and his administration. On numerous occassions the Bush Administration warned Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had bought up these bad loans, were in serious financial trouble and needed to be audited, but Barney Frank, whose boyfriend headed up Freddie Mac at the time, along with other Congressional Democrats, accused the Bush Administration of not wanting minorities to have affordable housing and Congress blocked any effort to audit or rein in the risky lending practices that resulted in the mortgage crisis and consequent economic collapse. Cuomo, in his 1998 press conference, states that these low-income familes would not have qualified for these loans if not for the "affirmative action" on the part of these banks which the Clinton Administration sued the banks and forced them to comply with. http://youtu.be/ivmL-lXNy64 So if anyone is to blame, it's Clinton and the Democrats who forced the banks to engage in these risky loans creating a mortgage bubble and then denying there was a problem until the bubble burst and plunged this country into the economic nightmare we are still struggling with today. The Democrats had good intentions, but they are so woefully ignorant of the economic impact of their do-gooder policies that they are bankrupting this country and driving us into economic collapse. And rather than learn a lesson from their government interventionist policies, they are now trying to intervene in other industries and sectors such a healthcare, but the results will be the same, chaos and collapse.

Posted on November 2nd, 2011 10:41am