Bobo went all in on the ACORN-caused-the-financial-crisis today.
I’m sure someone with less sympathy for leftist revolutionaries dissected this in detail somewhere on the internets today.
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chopper
oy, poor bobo can’t help himself, can he. bless his heart.
Hunter Gathers
When in doubt, blame the Darkies. Would Canada please take this assclown back please?
harlana
Fixed
j low
The closing note “Paul Krugman is off today” is 11 dimensional irony.
Elizabelle
I saw Bobo’s column.
It was insane. Throw in names of as many Democratic politicians as you can, and, when you bring up Washington scandals, conveniently forget Randy “Duke” Cunningham or Jack Abramoff. Saying “Anthony Weiner” and “William Jefferson”, alone, as Bobo did, covers it.
Biggest political scandal since Watergate?
David Brooks, were you sentient during the Bush-Cheney administration?
The selective memory astounds.
Who is James Johnson?
Q: How about “Who is David Brooks?”
A; An effing tool. But oh so reasonable. Don’t forget your totebag.
cleek
is my search broken, or do the words “bank”, “lender”, “leverage” and “credit” not appear anywhere in his piece ?
be cause it would be really fucking stupid to write about the causes of the housing bubble without mentioning any of those things.
Elizabelle
Thank you Harlana.
Brooks’ alluding at column end to Michelle Bachmann as a potential reformer (or even people thinking she could be) was the coup de grace.
This column reminded me why I don’t read Brooks very often.
Davis X. Machina
That’s just sloppy journalism. You need to say “Paul Krugman was off in heavy trading today, closing down 2.”
Culture of Truth
Acorn, blacks and hispanics brought down Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG, Ireland, Iceland and Greece. Oh, and Strass-Kahn, Bin Laden, Ahnuld, Weiner and Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark.
Culture of Truth
Acorn produced The Green Lantern.
fasteddie9318
These goddamn young bucks, first they’re trying eat food and then they’re trying to live indoors! What the fuck are they thinking? Bunch of shiftless
niurban thugs, that’s what they are.Alex S.
Yowza, is this meant to be his revenge against Paul Krugman and his meddling facts? Fannie Mae caused Lehman Brother’s collapse? (That reminds of my mother blaming my sister for taking up smoking again after seeing her smoking, too…) Anthony Weiner is just as bad for America as the financial collapse? Michele Bachmann is the only viable prophet of those disgusted with the system?
David Brooks is extremely off today.
fasteddie9318
ACORN totally used to give me and my friends swirlies in junior high. Damn near every day.
PeakVT
Okay, is FYWP eating all of my comments, or did I say something naughty?
ETA: I guess I said something verboten. FYWP.
ETAA: It was Faaaneee that FYWP doesn’t like, apparently.
MonkeyBoy
does FYWP object to the word Fannie and is that why my post is blocked?
Edit: I guess not. Is “Kevin Drum” a problem?
Edit: how about “smacks”
Warren Terra
Dammit, Doug, you got me to skim a Bobo column.
Apparently someone has written a book that, at least in Bobo’s interpretation, decides the main culprit and indeed the source of all things evil was Fannie Mae. I’m not gonna say Fannie Mae was blameless, but that’s a rather blinkered view of who was principally responsible for the housing bubble, especially once Bobo starts dragging in Acorn, the congressional black caucus, and Barney Frank (with special swipe at his having a ghey partner!).
Bobo proudly claims in his column to have made a mistake that Thomas Aquinas supposedly warned us against eight centuries ago: he read one book, and thought himself informed..
Catsy
Wow. Bobo’s a shameless hack, we all knew that–but this piece is astonishingly hacktacular and dishonest even by Village standards. I would be surprised if there was a single paragraph that did not contain some kind of distortion, omission or outright lie–and that’s not even getting into the staggeringly idiotic and counterfactual premise.
Culture of Truth
the Black caucus is responsible for LeBron James
Culture of Truth
Mark Cuban is part of the Hispanic caucus
4tehlulz
ACORN DID WTC
Martin
Republicans, still not racist.
I’m sure one of the trolls will be along shortly to explain how that was really a term of respect and admiration and besides: ACORN.
Sentient Puddle
@Warren Terra:
As far as crashing the economy goes? They are pretty much blameless. Their contribution was following the lead of all the bigger private lenders, and that was caused by them being partially privatized. But even if you fixed that problem and cleaned up their accounting books, the present day economy would barely look different.
Roger Moore
@Alex S.:
FTFY.
LGRooney
So, acting like the private sector is criminal? Jeez, what a commie Bobo has become.
Bobo seems to be really scared of the possibility that the D-side might make a comeback next year because I rarely read him exhibiting this much emotion.
fasteddie9318
I heard ACORN paid off the NHL to give game 7 to the Bruins and then incited the Vancouver riots.
Comrade Javamanphil
No way am I giving Bobo any page views but I assume this is the standard “poor people bought houses they couldn’t afford” argument. Logically, doesn’t that mean our bankers are so stupid they got duped by a bunch of losers with bad credit so many times that the entire financial system of America was destroyed? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t hire anybody that dumb to dig ditches let alone lend money.
MonkeyBoy
Apparently FYWP prevents me from posting the following link.
moth erj ones . com/
kev in-d rum/20 11/06 /fann ie-fr eddie-a nd-wa ll-st reet
ppcli
@ 2 Hunter Gatherers
He was born in Canada, but raised in the States from a very young age. You broke him, you own him.
Culture of Truth
Barney Frank invented credit default swaps
Chris
@ Comrade –
No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Of course our bankers knew better than to do that, but the mean old federal government forced them to give loans to those undeserving people, something they would never have done on their own, of course.
(I shit you not: that’s the party line on rightwingblogtopia).
fasteddie9318
Everybody remembers when Planned Parenthood sneak attacked Pearl Harbor, right? I hope so, because I hate it when people don’t know their own history.
Dexter
OTOH, crude oil is down another 2% today after a 5%-ish drop yesterday. I guess it is good news.
...now I try to be amused
Ha!
Is this the Times’ way of saying “When the cat’s away, the rats will play?”
I swear, Brooks and his ilk are playing live-action Illuminati.
Jay in Oregon
ACORN’s new, secret headquarters is on the set where they faked the moon landings. #TruthAboutACORN
Warren Terra
#Sentient Puddle
That was pretty much what I meant – they did contribute to the bubble, at the very least by their acquiescence. They didn’t help prevent the problem, and probably helped cause it. But they’re not the ones principally to blame.
__
—
__
@Martin:
“Aboriginal”: it does not mean what he thinks it does.
Villago Delenda Est
Interesting, the comments are going about 3-1 against Brooks, pointing out the painfully obvious if you’re not a GOP tool: that Weiner and Jefferson are small potatoes compared to the deserting coward malassministration entire. Not to mention the parade of shit that took place during the sainted Ronaldus Maximus reign.
DFH no.6
Really?
I get into a comment thread fairly early for once, and my comment is disappeared?
WTF?
Roger Moore
ACORN blew up the Maine and started the Haymarket Square Riot!
jl
The propaganda in the column revolves around this claim:
“Underneath, Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.”
Most analysis says it was the reverse, the spread of risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry (mostly from poorly regulated private industry) and prompted Fannie Mae to lower its standards in order to regain market share.
And the second sentence forgets that the financial crisis was mostly caused by the mortgage derivatives and associated insurance markets, not the housing boom itself.
The latest housing boom and bust was a really really big one, maybe even the ‘mother of all housing booms’ as some pundits have said. But it by itself would not have threatened the world financial system.
This column is Brooks at in his GOP propaganda hack mode. He gets mad and names names, which happen to be 90% Democratic. And for its disgust and righteous outrage producing impact, it depends on two statements that are factually false.
Culture of Truth
I blame James Johnson
Judas Escargot
(1) Total sub-prime holdings were only something like 15% of total mortgages. (2) The CRA loans tended to perform better than non-CRA loans of the same class (turns out that if you ‘encourage’ a bank to give a loan it would prefer not to, the underwriting standards improve). And (3) The commercial real estate market got hit pretty badly, too… not sure how you can blame that one on ACORN, CRA or the melanin-enhanced.
But, alas these are all just poor little facts. Mustn’t let them upset the Narrative.
4tehlulz
ACORN = ZOG
ppcli
Brook’s trying his best to distract and mystify, but there are some things no amount of rhetorical fog can obscure.
The biggest political scandal since Watergate “has cost taxpayers about $153 billion, so far”. OOOOh! Scary! $153 billion! Pocket change compared to the total govt. expenditures (2010) of $3.552 trillion.
About the cost of one Friedman unit of the Iraq war. Less than the interest on the National Debt racked up by Bush and co. Around a fourth of the (official) defence budget.
If that’s what crashed our economy we were in worse shape under Bush than anyone ever imagined. (Maybe Fanny Mae was like the mint Mr. Creosote ate at the end of the meal in Meaning of Life?)
Watching Brooks try to game up enthusiasm for Michelle Bachmann is like watching a former star pro athlete mailing it in at the end of his career. Knees gone. Can’t defend the fast kids any more.
C’mon David, at least try to look like you care….
Rudi
I wonder why Bobo didn’t mention $1,000,000 mortages or commercial real estate. Maybe he didn’t want to push Friedman off the “Flat Earth.” From Florida and Tampa.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/mortgage-defaults-among-floridas-high-value-loans-highest-in-us/1116533
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
David Brooks is off. Paul Krugman did not have a column published today. There is a difference.
Suffern ACE
Phooey. All I did was hypothesize that John Cole was actually Stephanie Zimbalist and now my comments go to lala land. Curse you, evil bloggy input device thingy.
Culture of Truth
But he doesn’t. He covers writes political BS under protest.
Xenos
Well played. I also had an impassioned and terribly witty comment but WP eated it. Something to do with privatizing Fannie in the first place — if we had kept it a public utility, according to Brook’s analysis, nothing bad would have ever happened. So there.
jl
Below is a link to the analysis that lies behind Brooks’ mention of Stiglitz as a Fannie Mae dupe in 2002.
http://hotair.cachefly.net/images/2009-03/orszag-fanniemae.pdf
DFH no.6
OK, a shorter version. Maybe that will go through.
My Republican-dominated business-circle here in hard-hit Maricopa County, AZ, believes, pretty much to a man, that BoBo’s bullshit is true.
Essentially, Democrats forced banks to lend money to undeserving minorities who could not pay their mortgages, and that’s why it all blew up and the economy went into the shitter.
Suffern ACE
@DFH no. 6 – which is funny in a way, since Arizona staked its economic growth to real estate development as any place did. I suppose they were expecting that miracle where all those houses get built and only the right sorts of people buy them.
scav
Simply Amazing how our undeserving minorities and Fannie can bring down the entire fucking world economy. Why the hell do we need that army again exactly? Well just wave an scarey steak-eating young buck with a lien at them.
catclub
I have Barry Ritholz’s “Get Me Re-Write” posting bookmarked.
The usual fact based demolition of the blame ACORN, blame Fannie, excuses that come from those who cannot mention banks or risk or underwriting standards.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
This comment thread is a great example of why Balloon Juice is the best site evar.
Judas Escargot
@scav:
We’re just so, so lucky that OBL and his evil minions didn’t figure this out. Otherwise, instead of crashing airplanes, they would have just applied for mortgages en masse and destroyed all we hold dear!
Whew.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
in a properly functioning society, fannie mae’s 150 billion dollar tab could have been paid by the trading houses that raked on derivatives, i mean, cost of doing business, amirite?
2liberal
re: cleek at 6
I think you left out DEREGULATION and “swindling wall street bastards”
Roger Moore
@jl:
Next, you’re going to tell me that brokers steered their poor clients into exploding mortgages because they were
bribedpaid fees by the loan originators, not because the borrowers demanded the worst loans available.ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ Elizabelle #5
Man will never be free until the last pundit is strangled with the handle straps of the last totebag.
jl
I watched a whole Congressional hearing on financial reform on youtube and watched one of one of the big banks’ main analysts/lobbyist, named Wallison I think.
Even he could not spin a convincing story. Other witnesses and Congressman and staffers chipped away at his version of the story Brooks tells. So the fell acts of Fannie Mae had to be moved further and further into the past, and were more and more remote from the crisis.
Because, after all, it is historical fact that the low standards began in the poorly and unregulated private industry.
And his story about how the bad government practices spread throughout private industry was in stark contrast to everything else he said about private industry.
One Congressperson asked how could obviously bad government standards spread through the industry, if they were too risk and threatened long run profits, even company existence.
In everything else, unregulated private industry was the wisest, the soundest, the most rational, far seeing entity that would promote efficiency and prosperity by responsibly looking after the bottom line.
But in this one thing, Wallison suddenly shifted to an infectious disease epidemic metaphor. Fannie Mae’s standards were a virus, a disease that swept the industry like wildfire. It was a bad seed, the rotten apple that spoiled the barrel.
He never got around to explaining how such a wise and all knowing private sector was vulnerable to the infection.
Edit: point being, even if you stipulate the truth of false statements for the sake of argument, the Brooks’ story makes no sense.
Culture of Truth
Acorn killed Biggie and Tupac
scav
@Roger Moore: A suicidal and profoundly patriotic grass-roots attempt to work an end-run around the terribly high taxes the companies suffered under. “Take our net worth! We are not worthy to be trickled down upon!”
Roger Moore
@Suffren Ace:
And it would have worked, too, if it weren’t for the Feds and their “anti-discrimination” laws! Back in the good old days, you could have all kinds of restrictive covenants that would let you keep the wrong king of people out of your neighborhood.
VERBERNE
Dean Baker dissected David Brooks today. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/
DFH no.6
@ Suffern ACE – it’s bang your head on the wall frustrating to me (even after decades of shaking my head in disbelief at the absurdities engaged in by movement conservatives and their allegedly “libertarian” fellow-travelers).
These business colleagues of mine aren’t entitled retired kooks on Hoveround scooters screaming to get government out of their Medicare (though we have way more than our share of those assholes around here).
These are accomplished (mostly) entrepreneurs, executives, managers, and high-level salesmen. The local business and job creators and innovators who consider themselves hardnosed and pragmatic on economic realities.
And for the most part, they are just that. Most of them that I know are really good at creating and running companies (or selling for them). But on essentially tribal shit like this they just go right down the rabbit hole.
Almost none of the massive new home construction around here went to poor minorities (mostly Hispanics in AZ) or even poor whites, but to middle class white people.
Most of the poor people who did get into the housing market here did it on fairly low-priced older re-sales in the city of Phoenix proper.
The people being foreclosed on their $200K+ newly-built homes aren’t the poor.
Warren Terra
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
This line is a thing of beauty and deserves at the very least to be added to the rotation of taglines in the Balloon Juice masthead.
chopper
ACORN is responsible for the gum disease known as (echo) GIN-GIVITIS (/echo)
Brachiator
Ah, yes. If it were not for the blacks and the Hispanics, why we would have a boom economy and jobs for everyone. Fortunately, if we just cut taxes for the wealthy, everything can be set right.
Activists, blacks and Hispanics are so powerful that they wrecked the economies of Iceland, Ireland and Greece, too.
And then there is this:
You know who else has “low standards” and indulges in “risky behavior?”
Do you need ABL to point out not just the lies, but the racist code in Brook’s genteel prose?
But the Internets are your friend. And facts are facts. And so I wonder how, Bobo notwithstanding, a German bank became one of the largest holders of mortgages in Cleveland?
Hard to see the evil clutches of Fannie Mae here.
DFH no.6
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ – Diderot updated for modern times! (the original is one of my all-time favorite quotes)
You win the internets!
dmbeaster
jl @40:
They ended up fueling each other. So much money was being made on packaging mortgage backed securities and selling derivatives, that there was enormous pressure for more product (i.e., more loan origination). Fannie Mae was just one cog in that machine – many large private lenders did it on their own (WAMU). The lending had essentially nothing to do with the government programs to increase home purchasing, and occurred outside of that system. Standards were thrown out the window by lenders because there was so much money to be made in origination. And all that money flooding into mortgages enabled more and more lending, inflating the real estate bubble enormously since cheap money was available for any insane purchase of real estate. The housing bubble was clearly at the root of all the trouble, but what really inflated it was the speculation and leveraging created by unregulated derivatives/mortgage pools markets. That provided the untold billions of capital eager to finance more home purchases despite seriously overvalued properties.
A key components prompting further inflating of the bubble, even when it was common to hear talk about the growing real estate bubble and the possibility of it bursting, was the AIG backed investment product. Allegedly that made the uncertainty about the quality of the underlying mortgage pools irrelevant, except that AIG did not remotely have the capital to backstop the bursting bubble. In a normal regulated market, AIG could never have issued the volume of guarantees that it did. The world’s largest insurance company was converted into essentially a fly-by-night auto insurance company writing insurance policies when it had grossly inadequate capital to make good on its commitments.
Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory
ACORN hung the kulaks on Lenin’s orders.
AAA Bonds
I’m ACORN
It’s me
AAA Bonds
Smart Communists would be taking over ACORN right now
Erik Vanderhoff
@10. Culture of Truth:
You win the internets today!
Pangloss
ACORN cancelled “Star Trek.”
Just Some Fuckhead
ACORN stold my turkee
arguingwithsignposts
Hmmm, this particular bit of banker apologia was prompted by a book by Times colleague Gretchen Morgenson. No connection there at all.
Montysano
Is there a white throat left down which ACORN has not rammed?
Kobie
ACORN took away the Balloon Juice reply widget.
Kobie
Oh, and not sure if anyone caught Texas wingnut Rep. Louie Gohmert’s latest bullshit, but here:
http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201106170003
Montysano
When there’s an implicit promise that the government will shake down the taxpayers in order to cover Wall Street’s gambling losses, you’d be foolish not to gamble. environment,
jl
83 Montysano – June 17, 2011,
Yes, that is true. But as I noted in my comment, at that point Wallison was talking about events before 2001-2002, when the CRA, for example, would be corrupting influence on private industry.
Sorry if my comment wasn’t clear enough.
bjacques
ACORN gave me a dirty swirly.
And, um, Baader-Meinhof…
Fax Paladin
@Suffern ACE: Oh my god, it’s so clear now! “John Cole” was just a front because a female blogger could never be taken seriously! But now, Angry Black Lady is finally able to emerge from the curtain…
HyperIon
jl (#51) wrote:
Wow. I understood about zero of that article.
But I didn’t get the impression Stiglitz was pimping Fannie Mae. I saw Brook’s mention of him and wondered….thanks for providing the link. Now can you translate. ;=)
They wrote:
So how did FM get around the requirement to hold sufficient capital?
jl
87 HyperIon – June 17, 2011
I haven’t had time to go through the study in detail. I posted because it bothered me that Brooks was making lots of accusations and trying to discredit people without any evidence or argument in the column, and no links.
And some of the people named made some questionable calls (eg, Frank).
In Stiglitz case, I could find the report in a few seconds and thought I would post it so people could decide for themselves whether Stiglitz acted as a hack.
The research was published in 2002, before housing prices really took off. I think most would say it was pre, or early stages of the bubble (but not all, see link to Dean Baker’s critique of Brooks above).
From what I have read, there were two criticism one could make (with 20 20 hindsight): estimated probability of severe and widespread reductions in housing prices was too low, and, they underestimated the dependence between bad events, for example, they underestimated the correlation between falling housing prices and problems in other financial markets.
Roy G
ACORN would have taken over the country, were it not for the brave patriots of the Supreme Court, who had to pass Bush v. Gore and Citizens United, TO SAVE OUR GREAT NATION FROM ACORN!
Jennifer
Yes. Yes, I did.
Xenos
Them killed Blair Peach, the dirty bleeders!