Re: Bush Mortgage Bubble FAQs[W:1083,1531]
Wow. For a Conservative, if that wasn't a total admission of guilt then I don't know what is. Conservatives rarely "share" anything no less "the blame".
I don't see where it's anything of a 'total admission of guilt', and it has very little to do with either being conservative, liberal, libertarian, or anything else.
It has everything to do with being honest.
The honest truth is that there were many people that started down this path many administrations and many congressional sessions ago. And even though the office of president passed between both parties, as did the majority of either and both houses of congress, and even then, there's the private sector and business leaders within that private sector that also had a hand in setting the initial condition that created the path traveled to growth of the toxic mortgage bubble and it's eventual bursting.
Many academicians, economists, and many other learned have called it a Systemic Failure.
Systemic:
System-wide: affecting or relating to a group or system (such as a body, economy, or market) as a whole, instead of its individual members or parts. Not to be confused with 'systematic' which means 'methodical.'
What is systemic? definition and meaning
By it's very definition, there's not a single person, single business, single organization or single party that can be held responsible for the entirety of a systemic failure, a failure of an entire system comprising of many of each of the listed entities.
So, what have our leaders (and I use the term loosely) done to prevent similar future systemic failures?
Dodd-Frank? That's a joke. A cruel joke. A cruel joke played on the entire nation.
Yes, part of the problem is that are banks that are too big to fail and a source of systemic risk, essentially holding the rest of the economy hostage should they gamble poorly, lose, and get into financial difficulty (exactly what happened and exactly what will recur if there are no changes to mitigate this repeating pattern).
The counter balance to these large banks is many more smaller and independent banks. That's just common sense.
What has Dodd-Frank done? It's increased the regulatory expense incurred by every bank resulting in, and having driven, ever greater consolidation of smaller banks into ever larger ones that can afford the regulatory expenses incurred by Dodd-Frank. Increasing regulatory compliance costs forces a consolidation into larger and larger banks that can more easily afford those compliance expenses, that too is just common sense. Too bad it's common sense that eluded the legislators that wrote Dodd-Frank. Or, more accurately, the legislators that out sourced the writing of the Dodd-Frank regulations to the large bank lobbyists.
So that'd be a complete sell-out of the entire nation to the large bank lobbyists as just as it would be a legitimate accusation of alleged leadership and alleged statesmanship as it would be of alleged public service.
Am I still pissed? You bet.
I'm even more pissed that legitimate and effective controls haven't been put into place to prevent it from happening again, and especially pissed that all the legislation claimed by the professional political elite to address and mitigate future such bubbles doesn't accomplish this in the least. The only conclusion that I can draw is that the professional political elite profit from such bubbles and don't want to mitigate future ones.
Now, just to be clear, the above statements are not partisan in the least. Makes me wonder why so many can't manage anything but partisanship when there's so much more and so much more important things than mere partisanship and political parties at risk.
