Democrats Directly Responsible for Economic Meltdown
The Democrats and a handful of Republicans, (can you say RINO, I’ll bet you can), are directly responsible for the economic meltdown. According to a Investment Business Daily editorial, Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke, they place the blame where it is deserved. Squarely with the Democrats.
“A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. “No,” she snapped at reporters who dared ask.
Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.
“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.
Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.
They were the ones who screamed — “REDLINING!” — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.
If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.
No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry’s dreaded “CRA rating.”
The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.
The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.
The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.
HUD, in turn, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie, in turn, donated to the campaigns of leading Democrats like Barney Frank and Pelosi who throttled investigations into fraud at the agencies.”
And how are they reacting? Bloomberg - Democratic Congress May Adjourn, Leave Crisis to Fed, Treasury. From the article, One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that “no one knows what to do.”
I think that speaks for itself, don’t you?
Of course, the Democrats and the Legacy Media love to talk the economy down during an election year. They are going to blame John McCain and George Bush. Whatever they accuse them of, know this, they are really talking about themselves.
This year the American People need to hold them accountable. I sure hope they do.