Free Republic

FACT: The toothless 1977 regulations fully expired in July 1997, when President Clinton rewrote them to toughen CRA enforcement as part of a crusade to close the "mortgage gap" between blacks and whites. For the first time, banks were required to show results. One of the five performance criteria in the "lending test" — the most heavily weighted component of the CRA exam — was adopting "flexible lending practices" to address the credit needs of poor borrowers in "predominantly minority neighborhoods." Banks that didn't bend their underwriting rules risked flunking the exam. Ex-Federal Reserve Board Gov. Lawrence Lindsey, a staunch...

"Democrats pumped subprime mortgage market, triggering banking collapse"In the current narrative presented by Democratic Party operatives, the banking industry collapse of September 2008 was caused by tax cuts under George W. Bush and supply-side economics tracing back to the era of Ronald Reagan. The narrative, however, ignores the personal responsibility Barack Obama and Democratic Party operatives played in creating the subprime mortgage market, beginning with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The 2008 banking collapse was triggered by a series of failures in the mortgage-backed securities market resulting from massive defaults in the subprime mortgage market and...

This paper uses variation across states to estimate the number of jobs created/saved as a result of the spending component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The key sources of identi cation are ARRA highway funding and the intensity of state sales tax usage. We estimate the Act created/saved 450 thousand government-sector jobs and destroyed/forestalled one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to oset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases (Fig. A) rather than boost private sector employment (e.g. Fig. B). The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were...

INVESTIGATE THIS!by Ann CoulterJanuary 5, 2011The Republicans are back in charge in the House of Representatives this week, and not a moment too soon! Forget "stimulus" bills and "shovel-ready" bailouts (for public school teachers, who need shovels for what they're teaching), the current financial crisis, which is the second Great Depression, was created slowly and methodically by Democrat hacks running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past 18 years. As even Obama's treasury secretary admitted in congressional hearings, "Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system." And if it's something Tim Geithner...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private philanthropy fund, sold off almost all of its pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health-care investments in the quarter ended June 30, according to a regulatory filing published Friday. The Seattle-based charity endowment, set up by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and his wife, sold its total holding of 2.5 million shares in health-care giant Johnson & Johnson in the quarter, according to the filing.

I would like to share an email I found in my inbox from Barbara Boxer. FRom CONgre$$ .. where propaganda is King .. and Queen.

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...