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Are the Clintons the Real Housing Crash Villains?
Townhall.com ^ | May 29, 2016 | Larry Kudlow

Posted on 05/29/2016 7:41:31 AM PDT by Kaslin

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1 posted on 05/29/2016 7:41:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
Clintons started it and Bush didn't have backing (or enough energy and clout) to stop it.

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....

2 posted on 05/29/2016 7:53:47 AM PDT by trebb (Where in the the hell has my country gone?)
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To: Kaslin
I'm always amazed how stupid people are when they say the Democrats always help the poor. Really? Since 1939, the Democrats have controlled the House and Senate every year but 12 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774721.html), yet there is a higher percentage of poor people, more people on food stamps, more people on welfare, and more people out of work than ever before. I think the best one can say is that the Democrats have made their voting base dependent upon them to maintain power. They work for themselves, not us. Otherwise, why pass laws that exempt themselves from their provisions?

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.

3 posted on 05/29/2016 8:01:41 AM PDT by econjack (I'm not bossy...I just know what you should be doing.)
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To: econjack

“””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.


4 posted on 05/29/2016 8:07:23 AM PDT by shelterguy
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To: Kaslin

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.


5 posted on 05/29/2016 8:12:11 AM PDT by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: Kaslin
The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton's presidency.

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.

6 posted on 05/29/2016 8:31:44 AM PDT by mjp ((pro-{God, reality, reason, egoism, individualism, natural rights, limited government, capitalism}))
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To: Kaslin

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.


7 posted on 05/29/2016 8:32:22 AM PDT by Dana1960
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To: Kaslin

But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime,
Except little things like white water deals.


8 posted on 05/29/2016 8:41:58 AM PDT by Vaduz (women and children to be impacted the most.)
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To: trebb

>> 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.


9 posted on 05/29/2016 8:46:28 AM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: shelterguy

And yet they wonder why we’re PO’ed at them...


10 posted on 05/29/2016 8:46:52 AM PDT by econjack (I'm not bossy...I just know what you should be doing.)
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To: Kaslin

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.


11 posted on 05/29/2016 9:01:51 AM PDT by rebooted
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To: Kaslin
Great post, Kaslin, and a great housing crash summary by the author, Larry Kudlow.

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.

12 posted on 05/29/2016 9:11:15 AM PDT by zeestephen
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To: Kaslin

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


13 posted on 05/29/2016 9:18:38 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 (Big government is attractive to those who think that THEY will be in control of it.)
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To: Kaslin
Thanks, Kaslin! Just another example of Clinton hypocrisy for personal and political gain.

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.

14 posted on 05/29/2016 9:33:53 AM PDT by loveliberty2
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To: Kaslin

“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.


15 posted on 05/29/2016 10:17:59 AM PDT by Pelham (Barack Obama. When being bad is not enough and only evil will do)
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To: trebb

” 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.


16 posted on 05/29/2016 10:19:41 AM PDT by Pelham (Barack Obama. When being bad is not enough and only evil will do)
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To: Pelham

Not a dime’s worth of difference between the Bushes and the Clintons.


17 posted on 05/29/2016 10:20:06 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: Kaslin

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.


18 posted on 05/29/2016 10:24:52 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
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To: Kaslin

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.


19 posted on 05/29/2016 10:26:54 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
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To: Dana1960

“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.


20 posted on 05/29/2016 10:27:15 AM PDT by Pelham (Barack Obama. When being bad is not enough and only evil will do)
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