Wall Street Watchdog Too Broke to Do Its Job Thanks to GOP Cutbacks

In committee, when a preliminary vote was taken to see if it could be put up for a vote to pass regulations on F/M, not one Democrat would vote for regulation, so the motion died in committee.

 

fox news is hilarious

no new legislation was needed to reign in wall street

all bush had to do was send the word to his agencies to crack down, he didn't

 

Fox news didn't film the committee meeting on Fannie Mae. They only used it to put together what happened.

The White House Warned Congress About Fannie Mae Freddie Mac ...



nicedeb.wordpress.com/.../the-white-house-warned-congress-about-fanni...‎

Sep 21, 2008 - September: Fannie Mae discloses SEC investigation and .... of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were resisted by Congressional Democrats for years. ..... far back as April of 2001, President Bush sounded the alarm over Fannie ...

 

The White House Warned Congress About Fannie Mae Freddie Mac ...



nicedeb.wordpress.com/.../the-white-house-warned-congress-about-fanni...‎




Sep 21, 2008 - September: Fannie Mae discloses SEC investigation and acknowledges .... Bush warned Congress about the GSEs in 2008, 17 times, alone. ... post which contains about 2 dozen warnings issued by the Bush administration [.

 

wall street is what caused it

 

Obvious there was since Congress with Democratic help did pass some. Only trouble is, it was about 5 years to late. They were warned all the way back in 2001/

It's no wonder you know nothing about this. I can bet MSNBC or the rest never brought this crap out. You can bad mouth Fox all you want, but if not for them, you wouldn't know half of what the Democrats, or this administration does.

 

Another Democrat fail.

/thread.

 

Wall street was a big factor. But Fannie Mae was too. They took in many of those bad home loans Democrats pushed them to make. You put those two in with losing millions of jobs to NAFA and Free Trade, the wars and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why this economy crashed.

 

Derailing any part of Dodd-Frank is almost as good as derailing part of ObamaTax.

 

President Bush didn't play a game of golf after the embassy bombing in August 2003. He felt it sent the wrong message. Of course the media loved to show old footage of him golfing... became a trend after Michael Moore attempted to show the lack of concern by the president showing him golfing throughout Fahrenheit 9/11.

Obama played more golf than Bush within his first 9 months in office. You just don't care anymore...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2011/08/23/remember_when_president_bush_gave_up_golf

 

I hope people realize that both sides played a big part in crashing this economy. No one side is to blame. Business couldn't do much of what they did unless our government let them, even encouraged them.

 

Right wing Republicans and neoliberal Democrats (right-wingers) are EXCLUSIVELY to blame here. Spit on one next time you see one...

 

Fannie and Freddie were right-wing scapegoats, nothing. Another way of blaming poor people (shorthand for minorities in Republicanland) for the recession.

Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to Fannie and Freddie. The vast majority were private lenders. Bush pushed for these loans throughout his presidency. He, more than any other president deserves the blame for the massive housing bubble of 2004-2006.

 

Oh yes, lets be so Party faithful that we blame it all on Right Wing Republicans and Right Leaning Democrats and pretend that the real Democrats are blameless. It's views like that that allows these two Parties to lead you by the nose, allowing them to do all kinds of stupid things, knowing you'll all go along with it. We get the kind of government we deserve. We have put Party before the good of our country.

 

I never realized Frank and Dodd were HIS people.

 

They are the two groups who have more or less controlled economic policy for the last 30 years so YES, I do blame the right-leaning (and many so called "centrists") politicians pretty much exclusively for the sh!tty economy!

 

Why don't they just carve out a bit of that $85 Billion we just handed over to Wall Street?

 

Soros feed you that line?

 

Can you please provide me with some "left-wing" financial legislation written in the last thirty years that wasn't either a) watered down by the finance industry or b) actually WRITTEN by Wall Street?

 

No, Bush isn't to blame. He was only the De-Regulator-in-Chief.

 

Bush pushed for loans for the poor for those who could pay for them. He even offered to make the down payment on them. Democrats pushed for loans for the poor without reguard if they could pay for them or not. Bush was complaining of those bad loans all the way back to 2001, less than a year after being elected.



The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics. White House aides, in familiar West Wing style, could parrot the many social advantages that would accrue: high levels of home ownership correlated with less violent crime, better school performance, a heightened sense of commun-ity. But standing in the way of the realisation of this dream were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient and old-fashioned things as cash deposits and regular repayments — things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative. Meanwhile, Ms Achtenberg, a member of the kickass school of public administration, was busy setting up a network of enforcement offices across the country, manned by attorneys and investigators, and primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practising unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability. Achtenberg believed racism was a big factor in keeping minorities from enjoying the same level of home ownership as whites. She doubted if much could be done to change people’s attitudes on racial matters, but she was confident she, in cahoots with Attorney General Janet Reno, could use the law to change the behaviour of banks.However, when little or no overt or deliberate racial discrimination was discovered among the mortgage lenders, HUD’s investigators turned to trying to prove ‘disparate treatment’ of minority groups, a notion similar to that of unintentional ‘institutional racism’. If a bank refused loans to proportionally more black applicants than white ones, for instance, the onus would fall on it to prove it had good grounds for doing so or face settlement penalties running into millions of dollars. A series of highly publicised cases were brought on this basis, starting in 1994. Eventually the investigators would turn somewhat desperately to ‘disparate impact’, a form of discrimination so abstract and rarefied as to be imperceptible to its supposed victims, and indeed often only discernible at all through the application of multivariate regression analysis to information stored on regulators’ databases. In fact, by 1995 Achtenberg was actually having to rein in her zealots, issuing a clarification that the use of the phrase ‘master bedroom’ in a property advertisement was, despite its clear patriarchal and slave-owning resonances, not actually an actionable offence under the anti-discrimination laws.

These mortgage banks, which have been responsible for issuing about three quarters of the dodgy subprime loans that are proving troublesome today, quickly took the hint. From the mid-1990s they began to abandon their formerly rigorous lending criteria. Mortgages were offered with only 3 per cent deposit requirements, and eventually with no deposit requirement at all. The mortgage banks fell over one another to provide loans to low-income households and especially to minority customers. In the five years from 1994 to 1999, the number of African-American and Latino homeowners increased by two million.

The national banks, responsible for the remaining quarter of the current subprime loans, were put under a different kind of pressure by the Clinton team to boost their low-income and minority lending too. Changes were made to the Community Reinvestment Act to establish a system by which banks were rated according to how much lending they did in low-income neighbourhoods. A good CRA rating was necessary if a bank wanted to get regulators to sign off on mergers, expansions, even new branch openings. A poor rating could be disastrous for a bank’s business plan. It was a different kind of coercion, but just as effective. At the same time, the government pressed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the
two giants of the secondary mortgage market, to help expand mortgage loans among low and moderate earners, and introduced new rules allowing the organisations to get involved in the securitisation of subprime loans. The first package was launched in 1997 in collaboration with Bear Stearns.

So, by the end of the 20th century most of the ingredients that would combine to cause today’s subprime crisis were already in place. Nevertheless, the 1990s can seem a long time ago, and to grasp the connection between the situation then and what is happening now, it’s important to realise that only a small proportion of the subprime loans made since George W. Bush became President have gone to new, first-time buyers. A huge number of them have been refinancing loans, replacing mortgages originally taken out perhaps eight, ten or 12 years ago.

Imagine yourself in the place of one of those low-income householders who acquired a property in the late 1990s as a result of the Clinton home-ownership drive. What happened next? Chances are you managed OK for a while, but after a few years found that like most poor Americans, your income wasn’t going up, it was declining. Around 2003, with your credit cards maxed out, you desperately needed to release some equity from your home. Luckily there was equity there to release, so you refinanced for the first time and enjoyed having some real money for a change. A couple of years later a pushy mortgage broker called to suggest you do it all again, squeezing out the last drops of equity and opting for a low-start mortgage. So you did — and that was fine while it lasted, but the interest rate just sky-rocketed. You will never pay off that loan, it is pure poison to you, just like it’s pure poison to the investment bank that ended up with it on its books. You will just walk away. It’s not your fault. It’s not the bank’s fault. And it certainly isn’t George W. Bush’s fault — every attempt he has made to reform the mortgage market has been blocked by Congressional Democrats.

So that’s how we get from there to here, from crude attempts at social engineering during the early, heady days of the first Clinton administration to the turmoil on Wall Street today. There may be many technical lessons to be learned about selling and buying mortgages, about the best ways to price and manage risk, and about the regulation of financial markets, but I believe the most important lesson of all is an ethical one: it’s about not behaving ruthlessly when trying to change the world for the better.

Bill Clinton’s team, like so many progressives here in Britain, were not content to wait and see what fruits equal opportunities might bring. They felt compelled to secure their equal outcomes by any means necessary, even if that meant debauching institutions, corrupting professions and trying to skew the operation of markets. That only ever leads to chaos.

 

You mean besides Dodd-Frank?

 

The only issue was new unsold houses for as far as the eye could see and Wall Street continuing to pump more money into building even more unsold houses. By the time 2004 rolled around, you'd have to be blind not to see the housing bubble coming on. But you don't make fat commissions by allowing cash to sit in bank accounts. You gotta LEND that money at all costs.

 

Please catch the date of this article.



U.S. to Push Banks on Credit in Poor Areas

December 09, 1993|ROBERT A. ROSENBLATT and CHRIS KRAUL | TIMES STAFF WRITERS


WASHINGTON — The Clinton Administration, hoping to generate billions of dollars in new loans for small businesses and residents in poor and minority neighborhoods, on Wednesday unveiled proposed new rules requiring banks and thrifts to aggressively seek new customers in all parts of their communities.

Federal regulators will now be much tougher in demanding that financial institutions make credit available to the poor as well as the affluent, said Comptroller of the Currency Eugene A. Ludwig, whose recent travels have taken him from South-Central Los Angeles to a reservation in North Carolina to hear complaints about the lack of credit in low-income areas.

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-09/news/mn-65506_1_community-banks

 

You mean that law which was designed to fail from the start? Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers have already pretty much defanged the important parts of Dodd-Frank (e.g. the parts that are supposed to help consumers) and every month you have bank lobbyists fighting for derivatives legislation in the law that will introduce giant loopholes. What do you expect? The people fighting the bill (and those they hired) were smarter, better paid, understood the subject better and were better motivated than those writing it, and they are all pretty much on the right-wing as far as finance goes.

So yeah, what else besides Dodd-Frank?