Financial Fight Club: The White House vs. the New York Times
Welcome to today’s heavyweight battle over who is to blame for the financial crisis. In this corner, wearing black and white trunks, is newspaper legend, The New York Times. In the far corner, wearing red, white and blue trunks, is the President of the United States of America, George “Dubya” Bush.
Both fighters come out swinging. The Times leads with a scathing article, detailing how the president ignored warnings about the impending financial meltdown, while pushing irresponsible economic policies that drove us over the brink. President Bush swings wildly, issuing a 500-word statement calling The Times “irresponsible” for its reporting.
The fight continues on and only time will tell if the president will come clean and take responsibility for his administration’s role in the financial crisis that grips us all in this holiday season.
Washington Post Expose: What Went Wrong
The Washington Post continues its report on what went wrong to cause the financial crisis with a new installment from Jill Drew called “Frenzy.”
It was Wall Street’s version of an inside joke: Take a motley collection of largely unwanted assets, repackage them into a new set of bonds, and name it after the pristine white-sand beaches of an exclusive New Jersey town where Katharine Hepburn once summered. No one is laughing now. (read the rest of the report here)Read the rest of this entry »
Howard Husock Blames Poor People And Affordable Housing Goals For The Mortgage Crisis
In a New York Times op-ed today, Howard Husock, vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, is the latest in a string of conservatives to try pinning blame for the housing crisis on low-income borrowers and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Husock claims that, “the American public will be ill served” if community-reinvestment rules and affordable housing goals are “allowed to continue unchanged“:
“There’s little doubt that the rating agencies helped inflate the housing bubble. But when we round up all the culprits, we shouldn’t ignore the regulators and affordable-housing advocates who pushed lenders to make loans in low-income neighborhoods for reasons other than the only one that makes sense: likely repayment.”
Read the rest of this entry »
TAKE ACTION: Tell Charles Krauthammer It Was the Private Investment Firms, Not Fannie and Freddie
Charles Krauthammer wants to blame the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act for forcing Freddie and Fannie to issue lots of minority, low-income, and distressed neighborhood sub-prime loans. That’s bunk! It was private lenders, not Fannie and Freddie that issued nearly all of the subprime mortgages and triggered the crisis. And they were not subject to the CRA at all!
TAKE ACTION: Tell Brit Hume and Bret Maier of Fox News to Get Their History Right!
According to Media Matters, Fox News’s Brit Hume and Bret Baier tried to blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the crisis, claiming on 9/24/08 that the mortgage giants were heavily involved in sub-prime lending “years ago,” seemingly implying that it was back in 2003. According to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, “Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded.” Laying blame at their feet only diverts attention from those primarily responsible for the mortgage crisis: private lenders.
Social Security Privatization: A Review of the Risks
Nearly four years ago, President George W. Bush tried to make the privatization of Social Security a cornerstone of his second term. His approach was roundly criticized by economists and Social Security experts, unpopular with the American people, and failed to even earn a vote in Congress.
