This financial fiasco started in 1977 with Pres. Carters’ CRA . It said that the banks had to fix it so minorities and people with very little credit could get loans for homes. Each bank had a quota to fill to get enough loans so they would be allowed to open new branches. When the people defaulted on their loans Fanny and Freddy came to aid of the banks that were going down. In the ‘90’s , Pres. Clinton reinforced these plans. People look back and say,” look how prosperous we were back then” , not realizing that the prosperity they had was on loan and now it’s time to pay up.
When the CRA was created during the Carter administration, the administration also funded with tax dollars numerous “community groups” that have helped the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other federal regulatory agencies to enforce the act. Under the CRA, if a bank wants to make virtually any change in its business operations — merging, opening up a new branch, getting into a new line of business — it must first prove to regulators that it has made “enough” loans to the government’s preferred borrowers. The (partially) tax-funded “community groups” like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) can file petitions with regulators that stop the bank’s activities in their tracks, perhaps defeating them altogether. The banks routinely buy off ACORN and other “community groups” by giving them millions of dollars as well as promising to make even more dubious loans.
In 1994 the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act loosened up the regulatory barriers to bank mergers. Consequently, said Bernanke, “As public scrutiny of bank merger and acquisition activity escalated, advocacy groups [like ACORN] increasingly used the public comment process to protest bank applications on CRA grounds.” In other words, there was a burst of additional legalized extortion perpetrated by the Fed and its pet “activist organizations” beginning in the mid-1990s. As a result, says Bernanke, “banks began to devote more resources to their CRA programs.”
Also in 1995, the US Treasury Department created the multibillion-dollar “Community Development Financial Institutions” fund to “provide banks with access [i.e., taxpayers’ dollars] to new opportunities to finance community economic development” as “encouraged” by the CRA, said the Fed chairman.
The government also “streamlined” the regulatory requirements for CRA loans in 1995 under Pres. Clinton, allowing — and indeed pressuring — banks to make such loans without the benefit of many traditional credit-worthiness criteria, such as the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, savings history, and even income verification! Instead, the Fed told banks that participation in a credit-counseling program, many of which are federally funded, could be used as “proof” of a low-income applicant’s ability to make his mortgage payments. In other words, federal bank regulators required banks to make bad loans based on nonexistent credit standards.
Is this how it *really* works? How can regulators or the IRS just look the other way when “hush” money is passed? Where is the accountability? Aren’t there many hoops to jump through to prevent this?