Mortgage Crisis Undercurrent

Mortgage Crisis Undercurrent

Let’s cover some ground here on two fronts and make the connection once again between the Leftist media and the Leftist activists.

Exhibition A:

Private Sector Loans, Not Fannie or Freddie, Triggered Crisis
Sunday 12 October 2008. »by: David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers.

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.

I have already explained how lenders bolstered their position vis a vie these unqualified and under-qualified borrowers and home buyers. However this is an attempt to lead with a false headline containing assumptive language (buy the premise and check your wallet, caveat emptor!) that is picked up as fact, never examined further than the opening paragraph above. Yet, they admit the truth later on, while attempting to explain it away.

This much is true. In an effort to promote affordable home ownership for minorities and rural whites, the Department of Housing and Urban Development set targets for Fannie and Freddie in 1992 to purchase low-income loans for sale into the secondary market that eventually reached this number: 52 percent of loans given to low-to moderate-income families.

What the authors fail to explain is that along with these targets there were punishments delineated to force loans from these companies. Now these companies could have said, “Thanks but no thanks” declined the federal governments threats and suffered the conferences. In most cases the banks would have been sued, fined, forced to testify in front of congress and literally been destroyed as a result. The CEOs could have said I’d rather go out of business than accept this harassment.

Instead these CEOs played the game, like they had done their entire career. Their response is “you tell me the rules and I will work within them and around them if I have to.” They engaged in these subprime loans in methods that still made money. Some (many) of these methods were unethical, but not illegal. Now liberals like these authors can misconstrue what occurred and point to these companies as corrupt.

When the facts bear out that it was the cabal of HUD, FHA, along with many government agencies under the control of life long bureaucrats that simply “follow orders” and the GSAs Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that completed this pincer attack on the banking industry for the sake of giving away homes to buy votes rather than handing out cash.

On to a story about handing out cash for votes…

STANLEY KURTZ: Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism “Wright 101” 10/14 4:00 AM

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)

What Kurtz points out is that socialism is inexorably linked to the leftist ideology which is at its core corrupt. Elections are not won or lost but manipulated and controlled, Joseph Stalin said "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything.” This paradigm has seeped deeply into the leftist conscience of American leaders of various liberal movements from radical racial politics to feminism.

In the end you have an engaged Prada with Leftist movement anti-leaders who seek to consolidate their own power while decimating all those they purport to help. We live in interesting and very dangerous times. No?