You're very kind ::placing check in envelope:: but this thing about checking facts is a really big thing that a lot of us people are finding ourselves forced to do.
It's kind of like the info age begain in the 1600's w/ the printing press becoming available on the retail market and it had a huge effect on governments. For hundreds (thousands) of years senators and members'o'parliment could say whatever they felt like w/ impunity but it all changed. Instead they'd wander over to the coffee house (England had coffee decades before it had tea) and hear everyone quoting them word for word because some clown wrote it down and ran off a broadside sheet.
Now we got the same thing on steroids in the internet, everyone's got info and everyone can publish and broadcast. ::breathing into a paper bag again::
Well you’re doing a service by making us go back and examine our assumptions. The financial meltdown was something of a perfect storm and it’s hard to sort it all out even for the tiny number of us who find all of this engrossing.
I’ve been a critic of those who want to blame it all on the CRA because I was aware of the huge amount of exotic mortgages that were cranked out by the shadow banks that were exempt from the CRA- they were rolling their own CDOs and derivatives built upon them because they were making a fortune doing so, and stealing market share from stodgy old Fannie and Freddy with their low-yield conforming paper. But toddster dug up that info about the GSEs being pressured to make 55% of their loans Alt-A so the gov’t role may be bigger than I was accounting for.