Wrapping-up the Current Economic Crisis - America's Best Companies Blog »
Posted By Happy31 1 year, 2 months ago in Political NewsIt just keeps going doesn't it? The current economic crisis seems to hang on like a cancerous chest cough--you just can't get rid of it. Here is the latest on why things are going south in the markets, who's fault this really is, a lovely vacation for some bailed-out executives and a little advice from Chuck Norris and the Founding Fathers.
Read Full Story at americasbestcompanies.com »
195 Views Share Story 3 Comments Report
Other Related Articles: All »
RSS Join the Discussion
+ Add CommentComments So Far: 8 (view all)
-
0%
Wolfie20071 year, 2 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
FTA
Reply
Not that any of this financial activism has helped the market, which has been pretty consistently sliding down for the last few days. This really does beg the question: Has the bailout had any real effect on the markets at all? Would things be worse today without the bailout? Would they be better? No one knows. Oil is going down, but that has more to do with the fact that the rest of the world has its own financial problems. The only real effect of the bailout that we can point to with any certainty is that it has opened the door to further bailouts down the road. Whatever further effects may be forthcoming, there is also no question that we are in a recession. There are, however, ways to cope with that. Follow the link to learn how to recession-proof your business. -
0%
Wolfie20071 year, 2 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
FTA
Reply
Like any good whodunit, our financial crisis has a solid time line and a list of distinguished characters. A few of these distinguished characters make up a group that we might refer to as the Usual Suspects. These Usual Suspects are the obvious ones, the suspects that would be easy to finger. Wall Street investment bankers, mortgage lenders, and the troubled children of the New Deal and the Great Society, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Bush, Paulson, Cox and Bernanke are also on the list. These are the suspects that have been trotted out before the cameras to weather the invective of the media since this business began. Yet, there is a whole crowd of people who's culpability goes back years and they have been virtually ignored by the media.
According to Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, the timeline for the whole mess works out like this:
The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.
The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued. -
0%
Wolfie20071 year, 2 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
FTA
Reply
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.
As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. "What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?" I asked in this space in 1995. "Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today's self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?"
Frank doesn't. But his fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing. -
0%
Wolfie20071 year, 2 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
FTA
Reply
This brings us to the Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), our first suspect. Jacoby lays out a compelling case against him, inspired no doubt by Frank's insistence now that the private sector got us into this mess so the government has to get us out of it.
The second and third suspects are Senator Chris Dodd (D-RI) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), the Democrat presidential nominee. Why are they on the list? They received the most in campaign contributions from Freddie and Fannie and carried their water for years in the Senate, even in the face of warnings from Alan Greenspan, then Fed Chairman; John McCain and the Senate Banking Committee; and the Bush Administration, all of which warned of great consequences unless Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were reined in. In fact, it was Dodd and suspect number four, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who managed to scuttle a regulatory bill co-sponsored by McCain in 2005 that would have headed this crisis off.
Are we beginning to see a pattern in all of this? Between 2000 and 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac employees contributed nearly $15 million to the campaigns of Members of Congress on key committees responsible for their oversight, the lion's share of the money going to congressional democrats (in case you are wondering, McCain has received the princely sum of $21,550 from Fannie and Freddie since he was first elected to the Senate in 1986). During that same time period, those same high-dollar recipients (including accomplice Maxine Waters (D-CA) and other high-profile members of the Congressional Black Caucus) did everything in their power to keep the regulators as far away from Fannie and Freddie as they could. They wanted more minorities and poor folks to buy houses, they just didn't care how that was done, or how many companies and people had to be ruined to make that dream come true.
You can add others to the mix—Jimmy Carter, who started the mess with the Community Reinvestment Act; Bill Clinton for giving that law new teeth in the late '90s, ACORN for playing the race card and bullying inner city banks to make bad loans, RINOs (Republican In Name Only) in both the Congress and the White House for failing to really try to put an end to these problems when they were small—but the real culprits mentioned above, those who now solemnly declare the dire need for big government intervention and that they are the ones to fix it need to go before they do any more damage to the economy, to small business and to the people who suffer behind their ideological blindness and utter lack of honesty. -
-
-
Neutral
SohoWoho11 months, 2 weeks ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Time will show what it is. Friends prepare to what is coming at home! Here is one site i use to get my emergency stuff: preparedness supplies, preparedness food, emergency preparedness food
Reply
More News
Politics Daily
Unruly Passenger Disrupts Another Amsterdam-to-Detroit Flight
Security Measures Ramped up After Foiled Terrorist Attack
Napolitano Says No Evidence Yet Airplane Bomb Plot Part of 'Anything Larger'
Health Care Debate Dominates the Biggest Whoppers of 2009 List
Nigerian Man Is Charged With Attempt To Destroy Detroit-Bound Plane
Fox News Politics
Following Path of Least Resistance, Terrorists Turn Yemen Into Poor Man's Afghanistan
Investigators Cross Globe Looking for Details on Plane Bombing Suspect
Senate Dems Push House to Take Their Version of Health Overhaul
'Bureaucratic Plumbing' Scrutinized in Wake of Suspect's Watch List Status
Republicans Struggle to Hold On in New England Governors' Races
Add a Comment
Sign In With Your Propeller Account
Please keep your comments relevant to this story.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.