I thought he was a Bush, but I guess he could be a plant. Lauren Batchelder qualifies as plant food.
Giant PING List.
"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
The GOP opposes the Republican base AT EVERY TURN!
Hi all...how’s everything?
Here goes Rush on his ever popular cartoon version of the mortgage collapse.
He takes bits and pieces that he’s heard and winds together a tale that has the CRA, the Community Investment Act, as thr source of the problem, forcing banks to make loans that they didn’t want to do, and therefore inventing derivatives that passed off the risk, etc
The CRA never applied to investment banks and every mortgage they wrote was entirely voluntary. The majority of mortgages written in the bubble were by firms not covered by the CRA.
Derivatives were created long before the subprime mortgage boom and were a major source of income for the firms that created them, not a risk deflecting sideline.
Rush does conservatives a disservice by repeating his half baked theories about the mortgage bubble.
Moreover if the CRA was the huge problem that Rush says it was he needs to ask himself why the Bush administration had eight years to repeal it and never made the attempt. Their sole attempt at reform during the bubble was to try to get Fannie Mae to improve their capital ratio and to get them to quit juggling their books in order to increase executive bonuses. None of that had anything to do with the CRA, which was a minor part of the problem.