Phil Gramm: The DeregulatorIt’s a convenient excuse: claiming that the financial crisis was caused by the poor and those who made it easier for them to get mortgages. The problem: it’s simply not true. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Michael Barr and Gene Sperling lay the blame squarely where it belongs — with investment bankers, mortgage brokers and the willful lack of government supervision by the Bush administration. For his part, economist Michael Ettlinger looks at the conservatives’ claims and concludes, “they’re so far off the mark that one can’t even give them points for cleverness.”
Bush administration officials and bankers take a chainsaw to regulations
It didn’t take long after the financial crisis hit before the conservative talking points started appearing on Fox News, media critic Eric Alterman points out. The blame-shifting spread to several other news organizations, primarily on op-ed pages, the Media Matters Action Network found. Fortunately, some reporters kept pounding the pavement for facts: McClatchy pulled federal housing numbers to show which banks had the biggest appetites for subprime mortgages. Guess what? They got into the mess all by themselves.
Unfettered markets led to the financial crisis, but that’s hard for conservative policymakers and pundits to admit. So some have made a target of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which was passed to overcome discrimination in lending. This idea, which started on fringe blogs, simply doesn’t pass the laugh test, writes CAP’s Tim Westrich.
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