Posted on 09/29/2008 1:25:09 AM PDT by Lorianne
Going very much against the media meme that the current financial crisis is all George W. Bush and the Republicans’ fault, Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” True. President Bush warned about reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae 17 times this year alone. John McCain’s reform bill was blocked by dems in 2005. Thank you, Bill Clinton!
I have become a Bill Clinton admirer. He is older now, he has had open heart surgery and he has been President. He knows the kind of situation the nation is in and he is smart. He knows the genesis of our current and very serious dilemma. He also knows that history is going to reveal much about our time if it is not totally rewritten. The other thing about age is that people sometimes become mellow enough to admit their mistakes and bold enough to speak their minds. I just hope President Clinton will continue to go against the “bandwagon” and speak the truth when he thinks it will benefit America. Thanks, Mr. President, for your thoughts!
Hmmm...article last week about how 0bama was the lawyer on the case the forced a Chicago bank to loan money...
Don’t have the title so search doesn’t work to find it and I didn’t comment on it at the time.
But it is out there in the ether of FR somewhere...?
The truth being 0bama was more a part of it than he would ever want the public to know.
I think Clinton is a socialist at heart. But he realizes that free market capitalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs that make it possible to redistribute the wealth. Obama on the other hand is a pure marxist communist. He believes in collectivism no matter how bad it gets all share in the misery. No golden goose is needed in his world.
Now that he was being honest, the follow up question should have been, ‘did you or hillary pull the trigger on Vince Foster?’
he reeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaalllllllyyyyy doesn’t want Obama to win!
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No, he doesn’t, you can bet that Slick Willie knows more than most about just what kind of disastrous leader Obamalamadingdong would be and with all his grievious failings I still don’t believe Bill Clinton wants to see the land of his birth destroyed.
The the Clintons want McCain to win then it suggests to me that they believe that the tough times are only getting started.
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Of course they believe that, what possible reason could anyone name to believe the tough times are NOT just getting started? Have you noted that the blue sky, pie in the sky cheerleaders seem to have stopped posting on FR? Come on somebody, tell us that everything is beautiful in its own way.
Clinton has been getting little digs in here and there for months. The Clinton’s campaigning for Obama is lukewarm at best.
The focus of the Clinton’s wrath has shifted from the VRWC (whom they no longer view as a threat) to Obama and the Dem leadership. Not only do they want to sink Obama, they want to submarine the Dem leaders who abandoned them in favor of Obama at a crucial point in the primary. The Clintons never forget a slight.
Obummer knows that whoever BJ supports, loses.
Pray for W, Gov Palin and Our Troops
The Clintons were and are into power. Granted, they use their power to perpetuate their influence – some of which is socialistic. But their political machine was trumped by a community organizer operating under pure Marxist/communist techniques.
I hated the Clintons. I didn’t know it could get so much worse.
GO BILL & HILL – Take out the punk!
The pomposity of Bill Clinton never ceases to amaze me. Resisting efforts by me to put standards on Fannie/Freddie? It was Bill and his cohorts that lowered the standards that caused this mess in the first place:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.
After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable
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