Economic Meltdown - Birth of a Problem
The Democrats are so busy trying to deflect the blame for the current economic crisis that it’s hard to know what the truth is. The Democrats are guilty guilty guilty. What I am going to do is post the relevant articles so that the facts can speak for themselves.
Let’s start with the beginning. Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, Andrew Cuomo.
From an August 5th article in the Village Voice by Wayne Barrett, Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie, here are some of the details….....
“There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.”