Guess who’s buying into the revisionist idiocy that Dems and poor minorities created the financial crisis? George Will:
Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.
The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.” The book is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, “a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.”
The book centers on the Community Reinvestment Act and of course, the Big Dog.
The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, “whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum.”
In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing homeownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae, a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE). It became a perfect specimen of what such “partnerships” (e.g., General Motors) usually involve: Profits are private, losses are socialized.
Got it? The Carter-era CRA and the Clinton-era push for home ownership forced banks to give mortgage loans to “those people”, and because they couldn’t pay it destroyed America. Wall Street is 100% innocent, you see. It was all about the road to hell paved with Democrats and horrible government regulations and affirmative action and “those people” who destroyed the country.
Now I’ve talked about this book before when Walter Russell Mead demanded last month that the GOP make this racist lunacy the centerpiece of their 2012 anti-Obama campaign.
I’ve documented many, many times before that the whole “Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to give subprime loans to minorities who couldn’t pay” theory was total and complete baloney. Loans given under the CRA were to minorities that were in better average financial shape than the average subprime borrower. If anything, minorities who had better credit than the average subprime borrower were forced by greedy banks into subprime loans, even though they should have qualified for better mortgage rates. In fact, the vast majority of mortgage lenders that went under in the subprime housing disaster were not banks large enough to be covered by the CRA at all, so they made zero CRA loans and still collapsed. In fact, banks went out of their way to foreclose on minorities who had good credit and fell victim to bad loans pushed by the banks.
And the notion that the CRA and Fannie Mae and the Dems destroyed the economy and that Wall Street is the victim here is nothing new. It’s been proposed time and time again since President Obama was elected. The fact the George Will is only now getting around to this roundly debunked inanity just goes to show you how much of a complete toolbag he is. But as we get closer and closer to November 2012, you’re going to see Republicans move to this position. They’ll overtly pin it on “Democrat operatives” like James Johnson, but the dog whistle pipe organ will always be audible in the background.
“You see ‘those people’ destroyed the economy, not the really smart guys on Wall Street. Our corporate masters are beneficent and yes they made massive short-term gains and companies are sitting on record cash, but why would they ruin the economy they depend on in the long-run? That makes no sense! It was government regulation and affirmative action and trying to put all ‘them’ in homes in your neighborhood that wrecked everything!”
And as we’ve seen time and time again, the lunatic fringe of yesterday always becomes the mainstream GOP position of today. Whitewashing Wall Street’s culpability in the financial crisis is vitally important to the corporate interests that own the media and the GOP (and growing numbers of Democrats too.) George Will is more than happy to do his part by giving credibility to the big lie.
[UPDATE] And if “those people bought houses they couldn’t afford and destroyed the economy” doesn’t get the right’s dog-whistle motor running, “those people raised the minimum wage and destroyed the economy” will.
John Weiss
George Will is a hack. That is all there is to it.
Martin
The rule never fails: Liberals blame upward in the power chain, conservatives blame downward. To conservatives, those in power fail because of those who have no power – minorities, gays, the poor, the homeless, immigrants, etc.
The public only clues into that at the moment they realize they’re in the category of the powerless, and with Jesus and white pride on your side, that can be a tough realization.
Martin
OT: I just finished the granite and brick path. Anyone considering taking on a similar project that involves cutting a few hundred bricks with a brick hammer, do a few weeks of weight training first – it’s temporarily wrecked my right arm, and then my left because I was trying to move 100# pavers with just my weak arm. But the french drain that we installed beneath it should hopefully solve our flooding problem in the back yard and protect my new fence from rot.
Now to amend and distribute the umpteen cubic yards of dirt that I excavated. Thanks to this project my coworker made me an honorary mexican. She trying to get me to appreciate horchata, but it’s not really taking. I feel like I’m letting my people down.
Gregory
Well, duh. Will has been a dishonest snake whose job it’s been for more than thirty frakkin’ years to catapult Republican propaganda into mainstream discourse.
4tehlulz
Of course we all know that there were WMDs in Fannie Mae.
JCT
@Martin #3
Keep trying, good horchata on a hot day is a revelation.
Glad to see Will is branching out from his expertise on the climate. Fucking douchbag that he is.
Not!ABL
oh, you most certainly are. horchata is delicious!
dj spellchecka
i recommend reading barry ritholtz for a complete debunking of this zombie lie.
MattF
Will has gone past the ‘whirling into the drain’ stage and the ‘rushing down the pipes’ stage into the ‘keeping company with the other pieces of shit’ stage. You read him so I don’t have to. Thanks.
andy
Oh, he may not buy it himself, but he sure wants the right-tards amongst the small folk to think we blew up the Big Shitpile ’cause we were too nice to the black people.
Nothing our Betters like more than watching the people on the bottom knife each other after they send their Tools down to start some trouble.
gocart mozart
You would think that all these poor people who possess such enormous destructive powers over the banking industry and the world economy would choose to use it to improve their lot in life and yet they don’t. Apparently they would rather plunge much of the world into a deep recession and leave themselves worse off for it. Go figure.
Quiddity
George Will is merely cribbing from David Brooks who wrote a similar indictment a few weeks ago. Also, BTW, Gretchen Morgenson was a Steve Forbes supporter for a while, and while her straight reporting may be good, her analysis might be colored by bias. In support of that view, consider Will’s final sentences: “Morgenson and Rosner report. You decide.”
Whatever. Look at one of the few statements Will makes that has numbers in it:
2003. That was before the bubble was in full swing, but the point where Fanny Mae was maximally involved. After that, it was the banks and other institutions creating the toxic paper. Will tries to causally link “almost half” of something Fannie Mae was at in 2003, with “almost 40 percent” of crap loans in 2005. It’s lame.
Cat Lady
The Kaplan fishwrap will keep trotting out Will and others who make that specious argument because the polling shows that a substantial majority still stubbornly insist on adhering to reality. Consider the need for Will’s column to be good news for liberals.
murbella
nah….as i predicted, the event horizon of the 2012 election is beginning to deform reality for the ill1bertarians like Will. Like I said, you will see men (libertarian men, that is) bark like dogs and speak in tongues. Free market cannibal zombies will roam the land, every last libertarian there is will be pulled into the inexorable vortex of the wingnut black hole. The powerful specific gravity of wingnuttiness will eventually pull all libertarians into the encroaching Wingularity.
The Wingularity is near.
mikefromArlington
F George Will. That twit probably still sleeps in a onesie.
One must look at when the bubble started which happened to be from a tax incentive to sell homes along with Phil Gramm’s derivative deregulations pushed through with Clintones treasury guy.
http://liberaldefenderoffreedom.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-did-housing-bubble-start.html
R. Porrofatto
Amazing how the Community Reinvestment Act passed by our Congress could also collapse the economies of Britain, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc., etc. Considering how even if every single sub-prime mortgage defaulted (they didn’t) it would still only add up to about a trillion bucks, this all makes perfect sense now. Thank you George Fucking Will! (That is what the “F” stands for, right?)
MoeLarryAndJesus
I worked in the mortgage banking industry on a full or part-time basis between 1986 and 2008, and nothing pisses me off more than this blame-the-CRA bullshit the wingnuts keep pushing. There is absolutely no basis in reality to this Big Lie. The CRA was a toothless joke that didn’t “force” lenders to do anything more than window dressing. The dreaded Low Doc and No Doc loans weren’t created to give undeserved loans to low income borrowers, either. They were created to save time for wealthy borrowers and lazy bankers.
Fuck George Will and all who sail with him. This is some sick and shameful bullshit he’s peddling.
mikefromArlington
Besides, the thought of poor African Americans causing a global recession and financial meltdown is completely ridiculous.
DanielX
Nothing George Will writes at this point should come as a surprise to anyone; the guy is a ne plus ultra example of a Villager. Look under “pompous ass” in the dictionary and there’s a picture of George, bow tie and all. (Is there anyone alive these days who regularly wears a bow tie who isn’t an insufferable tool? *cough* Tucker Carlson *cough* )
UncertaintyVicePrincipal
What’s amazing is that US government programs and Bill Clinton caused dangerously-inflated housing bubbles not just in the US but all over the world!
I mean now that’s big government! We’re talking BIG. (cue “your government so fat” jokes)
Quiddity
@R. Porrofatto
You’re just not viewing the situation with the unique analytical skills of George Frederick Will, which sees Republicans as always innocent, and Democrats and other lesser types as always guilty for whatever mess we are in.
The Frederick no doubt stands for Frederick the Great, the man who brought Prussian militarism to Europe and founded the Hohenzollern dynasty, which gave us the excellent Kaiser Wilhelm II, who made World War I possible.
scott (the other one)
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
slag
I heard some Galtian asshole from MIT on Star Talk Radio essentially push this same BS. Hearing it there–of all places!–made me almost fall out of my chair. He also went on to compare financial crises to natural disasters in that we couldn’t do anything to prevent them. I was half inclined to send Neil Tyson a virtual kick in the pants for putting that douchebag on his show.
George Will pushing it = dog bites man.
meander
Gretchen Morgenson was on NPR’s Fresh Air in May to talk about the book. She’s been on many times before and always has plenty of scorn for all players in the financial industry. In her interview, she clearly laid blame on everyone, not just the CRA. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript, which blockqoute refuses to process properly:
[begin excerpt]
[Fresh Air’s Dave] DAVIES: You know, there’s a Republican narrative about the financial crisis, and it’s essentially that it was driven by government meddling in the markets, specifically the insistence that we push home ownership into lower-income folks who really weren’t financially ready for it, and that that was sort of the original sin and that Fannie Mae, you know, carried that program, Wall Street eventually got sucked in and accelerated it.
Folks will find some support for that point of view in your book, won’t they?
Ms. MORGENSON: It’s one element of it, I think, Dave. It is certainly not the whole story, because you certainly can’t say that Wall Street was a passive player in this. You know, what I think is a way to – best way to describe this is that this was a public-private partnership that was embraced by all of these characters. And they wrapped themselves in the flag and made it seem that this was a win-win for everyone.
Now, if you had had regulators doing their job, and if you had had a tough overseer of Fannie Mae who made it increase its capital, who made the company take greater care with some of its loans that it – that it guaranteed or bought, then you wouldn’t have had this problem. So you can’t lay it simply at the feet of Fannie Mae, but you have to throw in all of these other characters that were acting in their own interests.
It wasn’t about the homeowner. It wasn’t about expanding homeownership so that immigrants could, you know, build a nest egg for their children, because the kinds of loans these immigrants were given had absolutely no ability to build a nest egg. They were so punishing in their terms, that there was no way the immigrant could possibly pay them off.
So it was an idea, but the execution – the idea was OK. The execution was disastrous. And it was because there were so many self-interested people at the trough.
[end excerpt]
Mnemosyne
You’re underestimating just how wily Those People are. Because, really, who’s more likely to be able to affect the policies of banks in multiple countries, bankers who work for banks that do business internationally or minority mortgage borowwers?
I rest my case.
hildebrand
Matt Smith’s Dr. Who wears a bow-tie. Thus, as the Doctor says regularly, ‘bow-ties are cool.’ Of course, the person wearing the tie makes it cool, not vice versa.
Mnemosyne
Okay, I’m not sure how I came up with that spectacular misspelling. It’s “borrowers,” of course.
Woodrowfan
I think a poor black person made you misspell it!!!
AAA Bonds
It’s okay, George Will is likely going to die soon, well before he gets strung up by a mob. Win-win.
Drive By Wisdom
There is no way Barnie Fannie Frank and Chris AIG Dodd could have foreseen. It was all Bushes fault.
Studly Pantload, now with enhanced schmuckosity
@Martin
That comment was so spot on, I dedicate this to you:
Svensker
@ Drive By Wisdom
You need some drive by grammar.
Svensker
Clinton should get lots of blame for loosening up the regulatory arena and letting the banksters run free and wild. But I don’t think that’s what Will is blaming him for. Nope, what this country needs is less regulation, lower taxes, and more control of Those People.
ETA: Also, too, less saxophone.
Valdivia
@3 mmm horchata! loves it. except I can’t drink it cause I am off sugar and calories. but anyone who can should enjoy it since it’s delicious.
I am sure any moment now we will learn it was ACORN that brought us the debt default.
Valdivia
@24 meander–
thanks for posting this because i have heard her before and she sounded actually sane, unlike Will.
OzoneR
Every white person I know?
DonkeyKong
They had a segment on the Snooze Hour pumping this horseshit.
SRW1
Since when does ‘Dog bites man’ make for a story?
Montysano
@ Svensker 33
Yes, plenty of Democrats voted for both Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. And Clinton did bring us Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. I’m an adult, so I’ll acknowledge when my side aids and abetts a giant fuck up.
But somewhere around 2003-2006, when the GOP ran everything, someone had to realize that a terrible mistake had been made, and that we were heading for a cliff. The derivatives market exploded. Banks were leveraging at 30:1. They tried to can-kick until Nov. 2008, but sadly….
To see the hand of the CRA and Poor Brown People in this is beyond delusional.
Elizabelle
Stuff like this makes me think of going offline for months.
ETA: by that, I mean the zombie lies upon lies.
But thanks to Mike from Arlington for my laugh of the day:
“F George Will. That twit probably still sleeps in a onesie.”
So true.
Montysano
Realize too that Allen Greenspan was the unchallenged genius of finance until, very suddenly, he wasn’t. When he sat before Congress in October 2008 and admitted that this “banks will regulate themselves” philosophy was flawed, he executed a precipitous slide from guru to pariah. It was inevitable, of course, that Greenspan would resurface (as he did recently) to spout some revisionist bullshit and try to rehab his place in history.
Veritas78
Happily, almost no one reads George Will nowadays—more people read this excerpt just now than ever read his article.
Soon, he will be dead, and then no one will read him ever again. Quite certainly, no publisher will compile a posthumous “Best of George Will”, knowing that there will be no market whatsoever.
It’s time for all of us to step around the chalk outline.
bjacques
It’s all true. LoDocs, NoDocs and MoDocs (Mortgages Designed Only for Collapsing) under the CRA, and then Jack Bauer tortured bankers, under Democratic orders of course, until they packaged the mortgages and sold them as triple-A rated securities.
Horchata-cha-cha!
SenyorDave
Things were so much better in the 50’s when thosepeople lived in homes more suited to them. Like shacks in little towns on the Mississippi delta.
JD Rhoades
And if you really want to make a wingnut spitting mad, point out the inherent racism in this bogus charge that “it wuz the pulitically korrect gummint makin’ us give money to all them nigras whut dun it.” They start shrieking “RACE CARD! RACE CARD!” so loud it’ll split your damn eardrums.
the fenian
Anybody actually read that book? Is that what Morgensen actually writes or is the Bowtie off in his own sauce again?
The Republic of Stupidity
And no doubt,in Chapter 7 Paul Revere an JQ Adams attempted to warn the country…
PIGL
George Will synopsis:
you know who else wears a bowtie?
How come pompous quislings like him always seem to be immortal?
Cacti
Gotta stoke that white resentment early and often.
It’s all the GOP has.
EZSmirkzz
George Will is only covering Greenspan’s ass. The Housing bubble, the credit bubble, the tech bubble, the MBS, CDS/ CDO ponzis are all creations of Greenspan and his FED.
Reagan’s cutting taxes on corporations allowed them to keep more profit, which at the higher rates they had been giving to the workers in wages and benefits instead of giving the money to government in taxes.
Mr Will doesn’t want to admit that Supplyside economics produces economic crashes every ten years, He is looking for a political explanation for an economic event that the politicians couldn’t see coming because the economists didn’t see it coming either.
Everything we are going through is a result of bad economic and monetary policy that enriched the few with the wealth of the many. It is immoral, indecent and anti-ethical to everything he and many on the right claim to be the pillars of democratic societies. So of course he comes up with off the wall BS. He hasn’t anything else, and he has built his whole life, and career around those policies being so. His god is dead.
karen marie
You say that like it’s a surprise.
Mike in NC
The word compassion has become Kryptonite to conservatives. I actually broke down and sent a ‘Letter to the Editor’ to the local rag where I bashed our GOP state senator for cutting off unemployment benefits to 40,000 people. Some wingnut asshole sent in a counter argument where he said that as a nation we’re “too compassionate” and those lazy bums needed to go get jobs. I checked the phone book and found that the fucker lives in a mansion in a gated golf community.
Maude
Mike in NC
Was it Chris Christie of NJ? I didn’t know he golfed.
I read the budget line item veto today.
Christie targeted the most vulnerable in the state.
henqiguai
gocart (#11)
Um, Republicans ?
Mike G
Amazing how the Community Reinvestment Act passed by our Congress could also collapse the economies of Britain, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc., etc.
Especially when the CRA legislation did not apply to 24 of the 25 largest mortgage lenders — non-banks.
As usual with Repigs, it’s never the fault of the people with all the power and all the money who run everything.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
That writing is way above Will’s abilities. I suspect he outsourced it to a summer intern from Heritage.
Zandar
Or whomever ghost-wrote Morgenson’s book in the first place.
Linda Featheringill
OT but worth sharing anyway:
From the dkos hate mail.
Heh, indeed. :-)
Flugelhorn
I want some of your Kool-aid. Share?
mikefromArlington
Hitler wore bow-ties too!
chmatl
Meander @24 nails it with that excerpt. I’m reading the book right now, and Morgenson is much more balanced in meting out blame than Will implies. She does spend a fair amount of the early couple of chapters talking about the role Fannie/Freddie played in loosening mortgage qualification standards. But then she goes on to place plenty of blame with the ratings agencies, government regulators across agencies, the Fed/Alan Greenspan, and the general notion that less regulation/loosened qualifying standards were an unmitigated good.
I’m not at all surprised that Will chose to blame the one entity in all this mess that would most effectively serve the conservative agenda. Morgenson really nails the Fed, too. Wonder why he didn’t blame Greenspan for the collapse?
btw, it was that interview on Fresh Air that meander excerpts that prompted me to read the book.
Yutsano
U no can haz Mangione
the idler
“There appears to be a direct correlation between the quality of subprime loans and the degree of regulatory oversight. Nondepository mortgage providers such as mortgage lenders and brokers are regulated by 50 different state banking supervisors instead of a federal body responsible for comprehensive oversight. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan reported that these companies “originated the overwhelming preponderance of toxic subprime mortgages” and these loans “account for a disproportionate percentage of defaults and foreclosures nationwide, with glaring examples in the metropolitan areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.”
Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan (Testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, March 19, 2009), http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/2009-24b.pdf.
But what are “facts” to a wingnut? Nothin!
Stillwater
It works like this. Money and power are good, see, and good things can’t be bad cuz they’re obv. good, yeah? But those good things can be corrupted by undeserving bad people, who are people without money or power but who feel entitled to a taste of the goodperson goodness they can never have cuz if they were truly good people they’d already have money and power.
Poor people wanting things just fucks it up for everyone. Including themselves.
QED.
jl
@24 and @63: thanks for excerpt from Morgenson’s interview and more details from the book. Will is recycling and further distilling BS from a Brooks column of a few weeks ago. More evidence that these guys get marching orders from someplace, IMHO.
I am glad that Morgenson is not quite as dishonest/clueless as Will, but I think the her story, and the way she peddles it is fundamentally wrong. Not sure whether she honestly believes what she writes or was tasked by someone to provide a ‘balanced’ view based on on incorrect analysis, in order to provide feedstock for propagandists like Brooks and Will.
Thanks to commenter above for reminder that Barry Ritholz has covered this tipic extensively, just go to www dot ritholtz dot com and search the blog for ‘CRA’
Here is a post with Fed governors’ analysis, and a link to a pdf reprot (warning, truly massive pdf document at link)
Kroszner: CRA & the Mortgage Crisis
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/kroszner-cra-the-mortgage-crisis/
Then do a search at Ritholtz’s blog for ‘Fannie Mae’ and read down through those articles.
Only thing I want to add is that the shock value of this whole new round of bad analysis rests on one unspoken premise: that the recent mother of all housing bubbles caused the financial panic, and was the cause of the big bailouts. NO, it was most definitely not. The cause of the financial panic was unregulated securitization, and most of the money of the financial bailout was devoted to the derivatives mess. And the unregulated securitization began in the early 90s, and took off in the late 90s. Fannie Mae, as monstrous a public/private hybrid as it is, and as much as Fannie and Freddie need to be reformed or ended, had nothing to with the unregulated securitization boom. And it was the unregulated securitization that started the housing bubble.
Nonsense from one end to the other. The fact the Morgenson tries to play ‘he said she said’ balance does not change the fact that she is peddling bad analysis and spreading false history. IMHO, also, too.
Note: some commenters seem to think that the bail outs solved the mortgage crisis, somehow. The answer to that is no. The bad mortgages are still there, and that is why the ‘extend the pretend’ strategy of the US govt is still there. The bailouts did not do much to solve the mortgage crisis or the bad mortgage debt. Most of it went to patching up the derivatives and financial market insurance mess.
Jennifer
Helpful link for anyone wanting to push back on this CRA bullshit is here.
Among the pertinent details: in 2006, when subprime lending was at its lunatic zenith, 84% of all subprime loans were made by private lenders. That same year, 83% of all subprime loans to low and moderate income buyers were made by private lenders.
Fact not found at the link: the default rate on subprime loans made by Fannie and Freddie has been less than half the rate of default on subprime loans made by private lenders.
Also, too: I love how the conservative “intellectual” economic certainty of how things work – that is, supply & demand, invisible hand, all that happy-crappy – goes right out the effing window when someone like Brooks (who wrote this same effing column about two weeks ago) or Will needs to suddenly ignore it. So, gentlemen, care to explain why it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that all these things that happened a decade or more earlier w/r/t helping low income people buy homes suddenly caused problems? It wouldn’t have been because, say, there was too much money chasing too few borrowers, which caused lenders to lower standards in order to up the supply of borrowers to meet the demand of investors…who are the ones who created the situation, not just with the phony baloney mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps, but also through the continued strip-mining of the economy. By the time 2003 or so rolled around, the average American was already so deeply in debt that he couldn’t buy any more imported Chinese crap at Wal Mart. Where’s Paris Hilton gonna put her money, so it will earn even MORE money to add to the obscene amount she’s already got, so much that she’ll never be able to spend it all? We don’t MAKE anything in the US, so nothing to invest in here production-wise. Likewise, when the proles are tapped out, investing in retail isn’t going to bring a return. Even investing in production of goods in China isn’t an option, because people can’t afford as much of that crap, either. So…why not housing? Because real estate is a tangible asset that *never* loses its value. If the rubes who bought it couldn’t afford it, no big deal – the house is still there, you can just sell it to someone else.
Unless, of course, all your rich friends had the same idea, and by the time the deal goes south, there aren’t any marks left to whom you can pawn off the property.
Even then, it would never have become the problem it did if not for the bullshit inventions of Wall Street. Without MBSs and CDOs and CDSs, the situation would have been relatively simple: the Illinois Public Retirement Fund now owned a vacant house and to return value to the fund, it would have to sell the house. In THAT situation, no bailout would have been necessary, because everyone would know who owned what. The only reason it became the mess it was and is is because WALL STREET was actively working to COVER UP how worthless the shit they were selling WAS. You couldn’t do that if the Illinois Public Retirement Fund was the sole owner of properties that hadn’t been bundled together to help mask the aroma of feces. On a single property, the risky nature of the loan is all too apparent.
So, how could it possibly be that 16 or 17% of subprime loans (not dollar amount, this is a percentage of the NUMBER of loans), upon which the default rate has been only half as high, are responsible for the meltdown of the entire fucking economy? The answer is that they obviously aren’t, and both Brooks and Will and every other fucking lying conservative media whore out there knows that good and goddamned well.
Jennifer
Also, too: Fuck David Brooks in the ass with a rusty Garden Weasel, and then use it to fuck George Fucking Will.
jimbob
@ 66 Stillwater
Godadamn! Thank you for that! Yee-haw! Et cetera.
Kyle
Will is the epitome of smug, Serious Villager insiderism. Propped up as an ‘intellectual’ to be taken Seriously because of his Position as a long-serving courtier in the village rather than the quality of his ‘thought’; because he sports a ludicrous ‘academic’ costume, ostentatiously uses Big Words and advances moneyed interests. In a meritocracy, he would be the aging crank hanging out in the university library writing angry letters to his congressman, or living in a refrigerator box and ranting at the traffic.
ItAintEazy
@Jennifer
That’s why I like going to Atrios’s blog, they stopped caring about these things a long time ago. Now they just “heh, indeed” every fuck-up and outrage that comes along.
Paula
@Jennifer, I love you! Excellent post!
Most of the bad loans were not subject to CRA.
The Affordable Homes Act which president sets the goal was greatly increased by Bush.
Sec Cox permitted investment banks to increase their leverage
Fannie and Freddie initial problems were in their investment portfolio b/c the bought mbs
I could go on and on. Whose fault was it? It was mortgage brokers, credit agencies, relaxed gov oversight, no regulations over derivatives, and politicians
Paula
@Jennifer, I love you! Excellent post!
Most of the bad loans were not subject to CRA.
The Affordable Homes Act which president sets the goal was greatly increased by Bush.
Sec Cox permitted investment banks to increase their leverage
Fannie and Freddie initial problems were in their investment portfolio b/c the bought mbs
I could go on and on. Whose fault was it? It was mortgage brokers, credit agencies, relaxed gov oversight, no regulations over derivatives, and politicians
Mr Furious
I just finished reading “The Big Short” tonight, and pretty sure Lewis laid the blame squarely and correctly on the Wall St crooks and the ratings agencies who were afraid to cross them.
No mention whatsoever of the CRA.
Mr Furious
It all unraveled when the investment firms went public and were playing with shareholder (and now taxpayer) money–not their own.
John Puma
What, no mention of “predatory borrowers”? Will, you’re slipping!
I don’t recall Will getting into a snit about Bushie’s “ownership society.”
HyperIon
All the folks here slagging on George Will….please attack/mock the douchebag authors of this book also! He couldn’t write his crap unless they first wrote theirs. On C-SPAN they appeared at AEI (or one of the other right-wing welfare tanks) and their audience lurved them muchly.
El Cid
Why should we even let poor people and black people have houses anyway?
In the good old days, that never happened.
Ecks
Will left out the part where the gubbermint forced the banks to take all that revenue and sell and resell it into trillions of dollars of CDO’s and CDO squareds, and sell it to large institutional investors who really didn’t have any idea what they were getting, so that when the housing bubble popped, it was able to ignite a keg of dynamite orders of magnitude larger than itself.
Those crafty crafty well-meaning keystone kop democrats. what will they think of next.