Posted on 05/29/2016 7:41:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Stephen Moore.
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It's a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, and it helps account for his amazing business success.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it's a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.” She’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman - something she would know almost nothing about because she's never actually run a business, though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle futures market many years ago.
Hillary’s new TV ads say that Trump predicted the real estate crash in 2006 (good call) and then bought real estate at low prices when the housing crash came in 2008 that few others foresaw. Many builders went out of business during the crash, but Trump read the market perfectly.
What is so hypocritical about the Clinton attacks is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits here.
Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let's look at the many ways the Clintons and cronies contributed to the Great Recession.
The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton's presidency.
Under Clinton’s HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in "credit-deprived" areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn't comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
These new HUD rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20% to 3% by 1995 and zero down payments by 2000. What’s more, in the Clinton push to issue home loans to lower income borrowers, Fannie and Freddie made a common practice to virtually end credit documentation, low credit scores were disregarded, and income and job history was also thrown aside. The phrase “subprime” became commonplace. What an understatement.
Next the Clinton administration's rules ordered the taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to expand their quotas of risky loans from 30% of portfolio to 50% as part of a big push to expand home ownership. Fannie and Freddie were securitizing these home loans and offering 100 percent taxpayer guarantees of repayment. So now taxpayers were on the hook for these risky, low down payment loans.
Tragically, when prices fell, lower income folks who really could not afford these mortgages under normal credit standards, suffered massive foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. So many will never get credit again. It’s a perfect example of liberals using government allegedly to help the poor, but the ultimate consequences were disastrous for them.
Additionally, ultra-easy money from the Fed also played a key role. Rates were held too low for too long in 2002-2005, which created asset price bubbles in housing, commodities, gold, oil, and elsewhere. When the Fed finally tightened, prices collapsed. So did mortgage collateral (homes) and mortgage bonds that depended on the collateral. Many bond packages were written to please Fannie and Freddie, based on the fantastical idea that home prices would never fall. Fannie and Freddie, by the way, cost the taxpayers $187 billion.
Just to make this story worse, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama voted to filibuster a Republican effort to roll back Fannie and Freddie. But on top of all this, while Hillary was propping up Fannie and Freddie, she was taking contributions from their foundations. Here is how a Washington Times investigative report concluded:
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae's political action committee and individuals linked to the companies donated $75,500 to Mrs. Clinton's senatorial campaign. And on top of that, the embattled Clinton Foundation received a $50,000 contribution from Freddie Mac, according to the Times. To be clear, there was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story with plenty of blame all around. And the Fannie/Freddie story is still not solved. It now includes profit sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.
Meanwhile, Hillary’s attempt to blame Donald trump is utterly absurd. Buying low and selling high is not against the law. In fact, Mr. Trump’s investment acumen may serve America well in the not too distant future.
I still remember Barney Frank-eater and Chris Dodd telling us that Fannie and Freddy were on solid granite a very short while before the whole market crashed.
Bush should have come to the People and laid out the fraud that was being perpetrated on everyone - it may not have stopped it but it would have given credibility to our side of the aisle.
Unlike Bush, Trump won't pull any punches on either side of the aisle when someone needs to be B!$ch-slapped....
Equally damning is that the Republicans have controlled both houses since 2011 and have absolutely nothing to show for it. It's time to clean house...on both sides of the isle.
“””Equally damning is that the Republicans have controlled both houses since 2011 and have absolutely nothing to show for it. “”
Their legacy is that they fought hard to give hussien everything he wanted.
The thing is, the housing crash became inevitable the moment Bill Clinton signed the “housing reform” bills into law. Anyone with a three digit IQ could see that at the time. What I don’t get is why the Republicans at the time weren’t shouting from the rooftops that granting mortgages to people who can’t afford them is a failing strategy from the get-go and bound to end up badly.
The effects of stupid monetary policy might not be immediate, but they are unavoidable. I think the Democrat strategy is to put the stupid policy in place while talking about how good it is for poor people, and gambling that they will not be in power when the effects of the policy finally become too large to ignore. That way, Democrats can always run on the issue that they “care”, while never suffering any consequence from their abysmally rotten economic policies.
The cause was libtard social engineering, which began in 1994, when Clinton launched the National Partners in Homeownership, a private-public cooperative with one goal, which was to raise the numbers of homeowners across America.
The problem on this that I see, is not that Trump or anyone else, sought to buy low and sell high, but the fact that DJT has, in the past, blamed BUSH for the housing collapse. He appears to not know how the Clinton’s rigged the system. I am a long standing DJT supporter and he needs to address this. Because it is false, and it was baked in the cake for the housing market to fail by the time we had the 2000 election. Had Gore won, it would have fallen on HIS watch.
It is 100% true that Bush was unable to fix this; he never had the votes on the right committees, even from his own party. Some of the congress members from the south come to mind, in fact. There were too many in Congress who had their beaks in the water pool, both parties.
I will never forgive Karl Rove, EVER, for not putting GWB in front of the camera, on a nationally televised address, warning the American people that unless Congress gets their crap together, the housing market is going to collapse. And the economy will go to hell.
Never, ever.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime,
Except little things like white water deals.
>> I still remember Barney Frank-eater and Chris Dodd telling us that Fannie and Freddy were on solid granite
Yup. Bush should have made a stink about it, but his weakness in dealing with the scumbags prevailed.
And yet they wonder why we’re PO’ed at them...
I stopped reading this because of the sloppy research. The cattle future gain for Hillary was $1,000 into $100,000, not $1million as the article claims. Whatever else follows in the article has lost all credibility. I’m surprised at Kudlow. Read Thomas Sowell for the causes of the housing market crash.
I live in Seattle.
In 2007, Bank of America was running home mortgage Internet ads here that said: “No Social Security Number Required.”
That same year, my neighbor across the hall, a very nice Black man, explained to me that he was earning a six figure income by recruiting minority home buyers.
His sales pitch? You can own a home for less money than you are paying in rent.
I have no sympathy for many of the people who “lost” a home in the Great Recession.
Many of those folks never lost a dime.
They just walked away from their homes when their Adjustable Rate Mortgages became more expensive than renting an apartment.
Watch Congressional Democrats in 2004 go after people trying to sound the alarm on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insisting that there is no impending problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yga7TlsA-1A
On another thread is the following comment re Clinton's server violations:
" She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her emails," Feinstein said."
Then, this wife and husband who have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of their hard working fellow citizens can have just that kind of privacy off the federal payroll and out of public office!!
These two Arkansas machiavellians have stayed on the national scene far too long, passing themselves off as "public servants," when, in fact, their actions as public figures have revealed a different nature altogether, and one that advanced technology finally may have enabled "the People" to discern.
“Under Clinton’s HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas.”
So how come the genius GW Bush didn’t change this? Wasn’t he President after Clinton?
” Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. “
This isn’t accurate. CRA required banks to make some loans, and they didn’t have to be mortgages, in the areas where they were taking in deposits. This applied only to retail banks and not all lenders. Again Bush could have changed this policy and didn’t.There was no requirement for banks under the CRA to ignore conforming loan standards. They were pressured to do so by the market because non-CRA lenders were rolling out high yield non-conforming mortgages and that’s what investors wanted to buy.
“These new HUD rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20% to 3% by 1995 and zero down payments by 2000.”
GW Bush passed the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which gave “free” downpayments to select minorities.
“Fannie and Freddie made a common practice to virtually end credit documentation, low credit scores were disregarded, and income and job history was also thrown aside”
That’s not true at all. F&F continued to write conforming paper all through the bubble. Their private sector competition wrote NINJA, Option ARM, No Down high yield mortgages. The high yield/high risk sector grew enormously and was crowding out F&F’s stodgy low yield conforming paper.
“Fannie and Freddie were securitizing these home loans and offering 100 percent taxpayer guarantees of repayment.”
There was no obligation for the American taxpayer to guarantee F&F’s paper. They were listed stocks on the New York Exchange owned by investors. The Bush administration decided to stick the taxpayer with bailing out these investors. There was no legal obligation. Why, you’ll have to decide for yourself. To save the banking system was the surface excuse.
” Clintons started it and Bush didn’t have backing (or enough energy and clout) to stop it.”
He didn’t want to stop it. In fact his administration threw gasoline on the fire. No one in the Bush administration wanted to hear that we were in a huge housing bubble.
Not a dime’s worth of difference between the Bushes and the Clintons.
A lot of what happened with the Sub-Prime collapse started under Bill Clinton with the Community Re-Investment Act that was passed to spur people to buy homes. Accelerated when Glass-Stegal was repealed and went into overdrive with Bush 43 and the ceiling on leverage was essentially taken off risk for banks and mortgage companies. That is thumb nail version. We have yet to recover from any of this and have in reality been in a Deep Recession or Depression since the Tech Bust in 2000.
There were also a number of very astute Hedge Fund operators that saw that crash coming and bet accordingly. Many of the same people Hillary and Bill have taken money from over the years.
“It is 100% true that Bush was unable to fix this;”
“Unable”? He never acknowledged that there was a bubble, until the damned thing started collapsing.
Bush had made noises about reforming Fannie and Freddie but it had nothing to do with halting subprime lending, a practice that Bush was all in favor of. Fannie had a debt to equity ratio that wasn’t sufficient, they were making more loans than their capital could support. The managers were also cooking the books so that they would get maximum bonuses. But none of this was at the root of the housing bubble or subprime lending. The greatest amount of subprime lending was going on in the unregulated shadow banking sector of Wall Street because fortunes were being made. At least until the pyramid collapsed.
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