souixan said:
De-regulation is as much at fault here as the dishonest people. The money and credit crunch I blame partly on job exporting creating lower numbers of middle class and more people needing credit just to make due. 159,000 jobs in America lost in September, where did they go? Care to take a guess the answer is China or India? The republican government as of now has done absolutely nothing to protect American jobs and in fact has shown it even likes to pay it's troops less by attempting to cut their supply, benefits and pay. (We have had democratic congress and senate for 2 years but Bush has also effectively vetoed much of what he didn't want) It should also be stressed not everybody was trying to take advantage of the system. In the wake of nobody watching them they wrote in many things Balloon payments, raising interest rates to insane degrees after a certain point of time. This is as much, if not more, the banks faults then the people defaulting. Lending 9 dollars for every 1 you have is pure insanity there IS a breaking point and these guys should have known it. |
Wow, pro-liberal movement at its highest?
Bill Clinton left behind a two-year recession because of his massive tax increase in 1993, retroactive no less, which started the unraveling of what was at the time, the eleven-year economic recovery and boom of Ronald Reagan.
Then, on November 12th, 1999, Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. What that did was allow commercial and investment banks to consolidate. Now, banks began trading and underwriting assets called mortgage backed securities, CDOs, and SIVs, all of the toxic waste that’s coming home to roost today. That was after a one-year, $200 million lobbying effort by the Democrat lobbyists to put this thing through and it was done in opposition to the Congressional Research Service’s own report, the information is out there, all anyone has to do is go do a Web search for Glass-Steagall and repeal. It is unbelievable that the Democrat Party is trying to lay this at the at the foot of the Republican Party when it was Bill Clinton and Democrat lobbyists that pushed this thing through.
Last night on MSNBC of all places, Robert Reich admitted that Clinton and the Democrats are at fault for this!
In the latter years of the Clinton administration — when I was not there any longer, I should add — there was an attempt by Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin and a few others to deregulate financial markets, and they did. They split commercial banking off from investment banking. And many people say, “Well, that was the beginning of the problem,” and then, of course, in 2003-2004, Alan Greenspan reduced short-term interest rates to the point where every single bank wanted to lend money. I mean, if you could stand up straight, you could get a bank loan because there was so much pressure to get that money out the door. Money was so cheap.
Actually, it wasn’t the new act that separated investment from commercial banking; it actually combined them. And the Congressional Research Service said this: “Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses.”
This is a problem that was caused by Democrat lobbyists and a Democrat president, and these are the historical facts.
Clinton also put oppressive regulations on small business at the end of his regime, the pharmaceuticals, the tobacco industry, the logging industry, not to mention his law suits against Microsoft, a company that every company in the world relies on.
It was also people from his regime who ran Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac into the ground. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were run by Clinton cronies who received millions of dollars from the organizations. Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took charge of Fannie Mae in 1999 and used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.
Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.
Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.
In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.
Democrats were in bed with these companies and refused to listen to George Bush when, in 2003, he “recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”
It was some genius from Clinton’s regime who came up with the bright idea that everyone was entitled to own a home regardless of whether they could afford it or not. This was the typical pandering of the Clinton regime to minorities to win over votes! Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority home ownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”
The seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers such as Andrew Cuomo, head of Housing and Urban Development at the time, AND ANOTHER LIBERAL DEMOCRAT. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
