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Nice article. It really ties things up.

While I would love to blame Cuomo for all this Mel Martinez (whom I despise) was Sectretary of HUD after Cuomo and the rules he implemented at HUD exacerbated a what Cuomo did.

From your link:

When HUD released the next set of goals in 2004, it reported that after Cuomo's previous edict, there had been a sudden spurt of GSE subprime investment, "partly in response to higher affordable-housing goals set by HUD in 2000." Fannie had gone from $1.2 billion in subprime-mortgage and securities purchases in 2000 to $9.2 billion in 2001 and $15 billion in 2002. Freddie's numbers were murkier, but clearly also on the rise. In 2003 alone, the two bought $81 billion in subprime securities—which also count against the goals.

That was during Martinez's tenure.

Martinez's successor, Alphonso Jackson, ended up being just as scandalous by receiving sub rate loans from Countrywide.

The whole department appears to be incestuous. Also, note that Martinez and Jackson are both minorities. Did that play a role in their relaxing the loan requirements for Fannie and Freddie? They were obviously put there to appease the minority factions of the U.S.

The whole HUD is corrupt, in my opinion. It's intent has been corrupted by years of abuse and lack of oversight.

I realize a lot of people are trying to deflect blame from Bush but a lot of this stuff happened on his watch under Martinez and Jackson. While I don't expect Bush to be able to monitor every facet of the U.S. govt., he kept putting cronies in charge. They either abused their standing with him or he was too naive to see what they were doing.

In this case, pushing home ownership, these two cronies were doing what Bush expected; pushing ownership to make his administration look good.

Washington D.C. is corrupt from bottom to top. I no longer have any trust in the U.S. govt. As far as I am concerned they can flush the toiled called Congress and start over.

My biggest fear about Palin is that if elected, she spends four or even eight years under the spell of McCain and succumbs to the endless abuse from the MSM and the devil's spawn called democrats thus turning her into another politician to be castigated. I will pray that doesn't happen.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called "the gods of Washington" was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.

Thank you so much for providing that link -- I have to admit to getting lost at times, attempting to wade through the vast Google seas, this article has precisely the info I need to refute a bunch of folks who are hell-bent on repeating the 0bama-mantra of "McCain will continue the same failed policies of Bush" when in fact, this outrage began long before Dubya thought to sit in the Oval Office, not to mention how they constantly leave Congress out of their due culpability.