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Bush didn't sell any loans to anybody. Fannie Mae said, oh sure, over the next few years, we'll buy $440 billion worth of mortgages issued to minority borrowers. Because they were planning on doing that anyway, and it gave the President something to say in a speech. But keep two things in mind in all this -- the vast majority of subprime loans did not fail, and at least through late 2006 when they did begin to get desperate, the GSE's were acquiring the choicest morsels from among them. Critics claim that the lowest slices of the GSE "near-prime" or "A-minus" program purchaes were indistinguishable from subprime, but the truth in that is merely definitional. The worst loan that the GSE's acquired was obviosuly indistinguishable from the best loan that they did not acquire. The rest were more and more plainly superior the higher up the list you went. Compare and contrast to the absolute junk that Wall Street was buying up and securitizing. In any case, Bush was merely posturing and showboating here, and while there aren't any records to examine, it's almost impossible to believe that large numbers of minority borrowers whose loans were acquired by the GSE's in and around 2002 did not in fact weather the storm and are still living happily in the homes they purchased a decade or so ago.Just how many of those no money down loans that Bush sold to Fannie Mae were actually sold to minorities and how many resulted in them actually owning a home today?
Speculators are a specialized sort of investor, and they are a part of almost every market, and in some, a necessary part. They are typically well-heeled and sophisticated players. Rising home prices allow real estate speculators to do what they do more easily and more quickly, but their numbers remained entirely insignificant everywhere but in the media. Keep in mind the extent to which what you call "the bubble" was fed by mortgage refinancing. That is, an owner flipping his house to himself. Keep in mind as well the portion that was second mortgages (equity loans and lines), not original mortgages at all. If there is a case to be made for "flippers" driving any part of the market, I've never seen it. It's certainly not apparent in any of the numbers.The subprime housing bubble caused a huge market in home "flipping" that resulted in many subprime loans being sold to mid and higher income buyers, many of them who were "caught" when the music stopped.
There is no question on the other hand that mortgage brokers put a great many borrowers who were qualifed for prime terms into high-cost, high-profit subprime paper and that such actions in fact ruined a great many lives. That had nothing to do with market speculators however. These unscrupulous brokers were merely being self-serving crooks. Many enough were making a fat-cat living off of yield-spread premiums that provided incentives to squeeze a borrower for absolutely every penny they could.
There was no big scheme here. This was Bush making PR hoopla out of the GSE's publicly agreeing to do what they had intended to do anyway. And at the time, the relatively new subprime market was making everyone a lot of money while the pretty much saturated prime market sort of sat there like a lump. Selling loans is meanwhile how lenders recapitalize. It is a necessary part of supporting the market. All Bush's touting of the GSE pledge did was send a message to front-line lenders that they would indeed be able to sell loans made to minority borrowers. And of course to other low- and moderate-income borrowers as well.I doubt very much the Bush would have pushed those loans if the bankers did not push him to do so. Reselling those bad loans immediately was an important part of their scheme. I think you are being too generous, I have seen no evidence that Bush was worried about the level of minorities that owned homes before OR after the program.
You're surprised at Bush's having been two-faced? Bush's overall design was to kill the GSE's outright and "privatize the mission" by turning the whole ball of wax over to Wall Street. Same vision he had (and his heirs still have) for Social Security. In 2003, he sent Treasury Secretary Snow up to Capitol Hill with a grand plan to create a new GSE czar within Treasury who would report to Bush and who could overrule any action taken by any GSE officer, thus having the power to strangle them. That plan fell on its face, but there would be more where that one came from.In fact he claimed he wanted to "rein in" Fannie Mae just one year later.