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Job growth cools slightly, recovery grinds on [W:225]

13 trillion dollar mortgage lending market since 2000 and GSEs held 7.5 trillion of it and they had nothing to do with it? How are we supposed to begin to buy that?
A good start would be learning at least the first thing or two about the history of the problem.

Lenders changed practices to meet GSE standards to resell or bundle those mortgages -- or banks would not be making them because they would have to endure the risk.
GSE standards changed very little. What changed was the massive capacity for simply bypassing the GSE's and their actual standards that was built out by Wall Street. In the beginning of course, the percentage of garbage going through even the private-label shops was relatively small, but soon enough everyone who wanted and actually qualified for a new mortgage already HAD one. In order to maintain the astronomical profits and bonuses that had been going on, more original mortgages were needed. So unscrupulous brokers simply started writing paper that they knew at the time was junk. Then they sold it off through Wall Street. Then it started to fail. Then we had a credit criris. Then we had the Great Bush Recession.

On the one hand you want to say banks took on these loans and government regs had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, Im saying banks would never had made the loans to comply if they didnt have a risk dump via GSEs and to have that valve they needed to meet regs on lending practices.
LOL! Fannie Mae was created in 1938 for the express purpose of being such a "risk dump" and has been functioning as one ever since. It purchases loans from originating banks, thereby providing the cash needed to make more loans. That was going on already as of 75 years ago. But the GSE's will purchase only conforming loans. Conforming means that certain basic underwriting standards have been met. The loans that met such standards would have been eligible for purchase by the GSE's. The rest went off to Wall Street.

Active CRA enforcement meanwhile ended the day Bush took office. He spent his time trying to exempt banks and S&L's from coverage. And while the oomph behind CRA lending was ebbing, the Russian and Asian financial crises of the late 1990's had decimated the finance companies. Half of what had been the ten largest companies went out of business, This created a credit vacuum in LMI neighbohoods and markets, and guess who was primed to rush in and fill that void. Why it was our good friends at Countrywide, Ameriquest, New Century Financial and the rest of the unregulated private broker hooligans who did so much the dig the ditch that the Bushies then drove us into. Those folks were the crap originators and Wall Street was the "risk dump" where they got rid of that otherwise unmarketable crap. All the while knowing full well what they were doing and what the implications were.
 
A good start would be learning at least the first thing or two about the history of the problem.
Take the arrogance and stick it. We disagree about a lot of particulars, dont make it personal and dont bait.


GSE standards changed very little. What changed was the massive capacity for simply bypassing the GSE's and their actual standards that was built out by Wall Street. In the beginning of course, the percentage of garbage going through even the private-label shops was relatively small, but soon enough everyone who wanted and actually qualified for a new mortgage already HAD one. In order to maintain the astronomical profits and bonuses that had been going on, more original mortgages were needed. So unscrupulous brokers simply started writing paper that they knew at the time was junk. Then they sold it off through Wall Street. Then it started to fail. Then we had a credit criris. Then we had the Great Bush Recession.
Im not sure how you are missing the massive increase in GSE inclusion in backing this process but you are missing it.


LOL! Fannie Mae was created in 1938 for the express purpose of being such a "risk dump" and has been functioning as one ever since. It purchases loans from originating banks, thereby providing the cash needed to make more loans. That was going on already as of 75 years ago. But the GSE's will purchase only conforming loans. Conforming means that certain basic underwriting standards have been met. The loans that met such standards would have been eligible for purchase by the GSE's. The rest went off to Wall Street.

Active CRA enforcement meanwhile ended the day Bush took office. He spent his time trying to exempt banks and S&L's from coverage. And while the oomph behind CRA lending was ebbing, the Russian and Asian financial crises of the late 1990's had decimated the finance companies. Half of what had been the ten largest companies went out of business, This created a credit vacuum in LMI neighbohoods and markets, and guess who was primed to rush in and fill that void. Why it was our good friends at Countrywide, Ameriquest, New Century Financial and the rest of the unregulated private broker hooligans who did so much the dig the ditch that the Bushies then drove us into. Those folks were the crap originators and Wall Street was the "risk dump" where they got rid of that otherwise unmarketable crap. All the while knowing full well what they were doing and what the implications were.

The regulation ended when Bush took office? If you believe what you typed that I bolded, I dont know how you can believe both things. Thats you buying into political propaganda. You are incorrect in credit growth as well. The increase in credit occurred because of the legislation allowing commercial and neighborhood banking to merge. It changed the entire leverage and margin picture for commercial and retail banking and was a primary source of problems that we are still trying to disentangle today. Thats part of what Dodd/Frank was supposed to address.

I see you are more interested in playing the blame Bush game. Which is what I suspected all along. You want to blame bankers and Bush while simultaneously claiming government had little blame. Thats about as contradictory as it gets. Dem pushback on GSE regulation was gigantic. As I have said repeatedly, there is plenty of blame to go around and it covers almost everyone involved. You are interested in political finger pointing, not the truth of what really occurred. Oh well.
 
The GSE's bought, bundled and sold to investment banks to fund the secondary markets.
Oh boy. The GSE's serve as a middleman. They are the back end of the primary market, purchasing loans from original lenders. They are then the front end of the secondary market, packaging those mortgages and selling them to institutional investors. These include national and international banks. insurance companies, pension and money market funds, charitable and university endowments, and others with large amounts of capital to invest. The GSE's sold packages of loans that had met their underwriting standards to these institutional investors with their own agency guaranty.

The GSE's made a good profit doing this, and Wall Street saw a chance, starting in 2002, to get in on that act. They couldn't offer a guaranty, but with demand for MBS's going into overdrive as the result of central bank rates being frozen at 1%, they were able to ramp up their ability to buy and securitize mortgage loans into the secondary markets, and they had more than willing suppliers of original mortgage paper in this new and unscrupulous breed of private broker that was already writing plenty of paper that the GSE's wouldn't touch. Wall Street gobbled all that up, then dressed it up to look like high-grade paper even as the actual quality of the mortages being bundled was continuing to decline dramatically. While barely looking at it, bond rating agencies kept marking the bulk of this stuff AAA and investors kept right on buying it. That turned out to be a problem.

You think Goldman Sachs and other investment banks wanted to get stuck with massive amounts of junk securities ? Investment banks earn money on throughput and because of the way those MBS were bundled there was no way to value them.
No way to value them? Why not? A bundle is just a collection of individual mortgage loans. Are you saying that the bond ratings agencies were simply too busy, lazy, or stupid to look at the actual loan composition of the bundles they were rating?

The GSEs in 2000 were compelled by HUD to increase their sub-prime originations and by no means werea shrinking part of the game.
In a clarification that you have seen before but prefer not to pay any attention to, what was raised in late 2000 was the affordable housing target for 2001. It had been unchanged at 42% since 1997, and the GSE's were already hitting 48% and 49% with ease so it was set to 50% going forward.

In 1992 Fannie commited 1 trillion toward the sub-prime fiasco...
LOL! Where were they going to spend that kind of money? A total of $25 billion in subprime mortgages was written in 1993. Even by 2001, the number had risen only to $175 billion. The GSE's bought 11% of that -- a whole $20 billion -- skimming off the cream of the crop as usual.

CRA was given regulatory power in the early 90s to lower underwriting standards for low income lendees.
The farce continues. There was no regulatory power created anywhere in CRA, nor did the act so much as reference credit terms or underwriting standards. It called for all actual terms and provisions of the act -- such as making efforts to meet the credit needs of the communities they took deposits from -- to be carried out consistent with safe and sound operations. There is also no such thing as a "lendee".

That was the true impetus that perpetuated the massive growth of sub-prime mortgages.
There's not a grain or shred of truth in anything claimed here. It is all manufactured rot produced from rubbish and confusion.
 
Oh boy. The GSE's serve as a middleman. They are the
back end of the primary market, purchasing loans from original lenders. They are then the front end of the secondary market, packaging those mortgages and selling them to institutional investors. These include national and international banks. insurance companies, pension and money market funds, charitable and university endowments, and others with large amounts of capital to invest. The GSE's sold packages of loans that had met their underwriting standards to these institutional investors with their own agency guaranty.

The GSE's made a good profit doing this, and Wall Street saw a chance, starting in 2002, to get in on that act. They couldn't offer a guaranty, but with demand for MBS's going into overdrive as the result of central bank rates being frozen at 1%, they were able to ramp up their ability to buy and securitize mortgage loans into the secondary markets, and they had more than willing suppliers of original mortgage paper in this new and unscrupulous breed of private broker that was already writing plenty of paper that the GSE's wouldn't touch. Wall Street gobbled all that up, then dressed it up to look like high-grade paper even as the actual quality of the mortages being bundled was continuing to decline dramatically. While barely looking at it, bond rating agencies kept marking the bulk of this stuff AAA and investors kept right on buying it. That turned out to be a problem.


No way to value them? Why not? A bundle is just a collection of individual mortgage loans. Are you saying that the bond ratings agencies were simply too busy, lazy, or stupid to look at the actual loan composition of the bundles they were rating?


In a clarification that you have seen before but prefer not to pay any attention to, what was raised in late 2000 was the affordable housing target for 2001. It had been unchanged at 42% since 1997, and the GSE's were already hitting 48% and 49% with ease so it was set to 50% going forward.


LOL! Where were they going to spend that kind of money? A total of $25 billion in subprime mortgages was written in 1993. Even by 2001, the number had risen only to $175 billion. The GSE's bought 11% of that -- a whole $20 billion -- skimming off the cream of the crop as usual.


The farce continues. There was no regulatory power created anywhere in CRA, nor did the act so much as reference credit terms or underwriting standards. It called for all actual terms and provisions of the act -- such as making efforts to meet the credit needs of the communities they took deposits from -- to be carried out consistent with safe and sound operations. There is also no such thing as a "lendee".


There's not a grain or shred of truth in anything claimed here. It is all manufactured rot produced from rubbish and confusion.

Cardinal, the poster who's not supporting agenda and who's liberal apology is as pure as the driven snow.

Not a grain or truth huh ? How would you know ? You being the arbiter of truth is like Bill Clinton being the arbiter of ethics.

Everything I claim is true, you rebuke it because it proves that everything you represent is a lie or based on a lie.

Tell us again how this all started in 2002 and was Bush and the banks fault. Or yet again brag about the 3% GDP numbers but forget to tell us that most of that came from massive federal spending with borrowed dollars.

And what was the GSEs total sub-prime originations by the end of 2008 ?

Over a trillion ? Because they promised in the early 90s at least that.

Also a credit default swap in comparison to the MBSs they were insuring WERE TWO SEPERATE THINGS...

Are you suffering from a head injury ?

That makes you rattle off liberal nonsense without the cognitive process needed to stop when you've been exposed ?

The CRA making sure FDIC Banks catered to the communities they served meant lowering standards under threat of massive fines....Wells Fargo.

Your basing your arguments using GSE data from the 90s and 2000s when they were corrupt to the core bundling and selling worthless loans with good ones and selling them off at AAA scores.

No investment banks didn't have time to go through everyone of those "AAA" Securities. A good investment bank doesn't hold onto securities, they pass them through....quickly......

They were stuck with massive losses that were at that time worthless. They bought the "package"

Are you saying they can go through now, extract the trillions of dollars in GSE backed sub prime loans and just throw them out ?

Jeesus Christ, whats wrong with you ?
 
So when the anomoly in the process is greater government involvement and a questionable social program that changed lending standards, your hypothetical is that the market itself is the only culrpit?
Well, considering that none of what you suggest actually happened, pointing at Wall Street becomes pretty easy. The GSE's had been performing their function for decades. Every administration had sought to expand home ownership for decades. No big deal until along came these unregulated brokers, private-label securitizers, and regulators who believed that markets were wise enough to regulate themselves. That's where all the problems came from.

CDS's and derivatives are regulated.
Some are and some aren't. Your blanket statement has holes in it. Big ones.

If you want to toss some real blame, go look at S&Ps and Moody's who overvalued the bundles and the layered mortgages.
They certainly earned their share. They claim they couldn't help it. The crooked appraisers who kept cranking their reports of home values up higher and higher are due some of the blame as well. They claim they couldn't help it either. But the driver of the whole shebang was Wall Street. It was their game, and it was their refusal to cut back on profits and bonuses and stop writing crap paper that had no future but failure that sent things careening out of control.

Except Goldman Sachs was selling them off as quickly as they could to GSEs and anyone else that was buying them. As part of the leverage and asset retention required they kept them on the books for longer than they wanted. Thats what sunk them, they were leveraged harder than the valuation of their entire company. Its also what sunk AIG, they were insuring all of the mortgages.
Well, yeah. You have to sell MBS's off in order to get cash to buy more original paper and earn more profits and bonuses. Meanwhile, particularly after 2006 -- by which time the die had already been cast on all this -- the GSE's began acquiring private-label paper for three reasons. First, they couldn't meet their affordable housing targets -- now cranked up to 55% by Bush -- because LMI markets had been sat on and gobbled up by predatory brokers leaving less and less that the GSE's could buy directly. Second, they needed to acquire some high-income paper if they were to satisfy the growing cries of private investors. Third, their primary market share had shrunk to 25% and their secondary market share to 40%. After enduring a restatement of earnings, they needed to get back on the board.

As for bolded, its categorically FALSE. If you are going to make things up we dont have much to talk about.
LOL!!! Better check your facts. Starting in 2002, the GSE's became less and less of a factor in primary and secondary mortgage markets as the wild-man private-label securitization shops built out by Wall Street pushed into more and more of the market until it was too late. If you didn't know that much, you knew very little indeed!
 
Well, considering that none of what you suggest actually happened, pointing at Wall Street becomes pretty easy. The GSE's had been performing their function for decades. Every administration had sought to expand home ownership for decades. No big deal until along came these unregulated brokers, private-label securitizers, and regulators who believed that markets were wise enough to regulate themselves. That's where all the problems came from.

You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. You claim Bush cranked up GSE involvement then argue that the GSEs had nothing to do with it. Im done debating with someone whose base argument is dishonest.
 
Well, considering that none of what you suggest actually
happened, pointing at Wall Street becomes pretty easy. The GSE's had been performing their function for decades. Every administration had sought to expand home ownership for decades. No big deal until along came these unregulated brokers, private-label securitizers, and regulators who believed that markets were wise enough to regulate themselves. That's where all the problems came from.


Some are and some aren't. Your blanket statement has holes in it. Big ones.


They certainly earned their share. They claim they couldn't help it. The crooked appraisers who kept cranking their reports of home values up higher and higher are due some of the blame as well. They claim they couldn't help it either. But the driver of the whole shebang was Wall Street. It was their game, and it was their refusal to cut back on profits and bonuses and stop writing crap paper that had no future but failure that sent things careening out of control.


Well, yeah. You have to sell MBS's off in order to get cash to buy more original paper and earn more profits and bonuses. Meanwhile, particularly after 2006 -- by which time the die had already been cast on all this -- the GSE's began acquiring private-label paper for three reasons. First, they couldn't meet their affordable housing targets -- now cranked up to 55% by Bush -- because LMI markets had been sat on and gobbled up by predatory brokers leaving less and less that the GSE's could buy directly. Second, they needed to acquire some high-income paper if they were to satisfy the growing cries of private investors. Third, their primary market share had shrunk to 25% and their secondary market share to 40%. After enduring a restatement of earnings, they needed to get back on the board.


LOL!!! Better check your facts. Starting in 2002, the GSE's became less and less of a factor in primary and secondary mortgage markets as the wild-man private-label securitization shops built out by Wall Street pushed into more and more of the market until it was too late. If you didn't know that much, you knew very little indeed!

Who cranked the GSEs targets on sub prime mortgages up to 55% ?

Who cranked them up to 40% ? 30% ?

Why was it so easy to obtain credit in the first place ?
 
You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. You claim Bush cranked
up GSE involvement then argue that the GSEs had nothing to do with it. Im done debating with someone whose base argument is dishonest.

THATS Cardinal in a nut shell. He so determined to villify Bush he'll eventually contradict himself and rebut his own argument.

Liberals ALL debate from a point of dishonesty. Otherwise they wouldn't have anything to say.
 
Banks that wanted to make an aquisition, merge or be aquired by another banks had to have a green light on CRA rating to move forward with any of that. Thats the force part of the equation.
Force? LOL! That was Clinton swagger. There is nothing in CRA that says anything at all about enforcement or about acquisitions or interstate operations. Even under deregulation, the latter did require a federal checkoff, so Clinton implied that banks with intentions in those areas better have an acceptable CRA rating if they expected their applications to be acted on expeditiously. There are no penalties of any sort included in CRA. There are no means of enforcing anything. What prompted expanded operations in previously underserved communities was the carrot of proven nice profits, not the stick of anything the feds could actually have done.

Really? The financial crisis we are discussing says otherwise. Of course they performed better in the 90s. No one really knew about how much money could be made and the streamlined underwriting to the GSEs wasnt in place. After it was, in about 2000, the process gathered steam and GSE involvement increased.
More aimless staggering. The LMI cat was well out of the bag by 1997 and more than just CRA-covered institutions were getting their feet wet in that new market. LMI and subprime are of course not synonymous, but as for non-conforming loans, Fannie Mae began experimenting with credit models in 1999. The conforming model of course defined the credit instruments that ruled in prime markets, and the GSE's expected that the same would come to be he case in subprime markets. The instrument they were designing and testing was 30-year fixed-rate loan with front-loaded fees that a borrower could earn his way out of with consistent performance. But smelling profit, Wall Street had other ideas, and they and their private broker henchmen pulled an end-around. Before the GSE model could be fine-tuned and rolled out to originators, the Big Bypass had been built out and brokers were writing and pushing all sorts of exotic instruments that generated a lot of short-term profit and a lot of long-term risk. It was unfortunatley these low-doc, adjustable-rate, teaser-loans that came to dominate even in some prime tiers as sucker borrowers were lured into signing paper that they really shouldn't have.

If by "streamlined underwriting" at the GSE's, you are referring to Desktop Underwriter, a new version was indeed rolled out in 2000, but it was version 5.0. We are currently on version 9.0. This was not a new thing, but DU (and Freddie's LP equivalent) were much used to get quick purchase decisions for qualified loans. Some of those crooked storefront brokers would try to resubmit a rejected loan five or six times, hoping for a different outcome, but mostly the stuff that DU spat out simply got sent off to Wall Street. They didn't care about standards.

I think you need to scroll back and see the GSE involvement of the market rising and rising. Thats the risk release valve for the finance companies--insuring losses through AIG or repackaging and selling to GSEs. They had over half the market and in 2006 they were the only ones doing any volume of underwriting and buying.
The GSE's have had mortgage market involvement for 75 years, and as the population and market grew, guess what else did. You are perhaps meanwhile confusing "finance companies" with "investment banks"? The GSE's one-time 70% share of the primary market had sunk to below 25% by late 2006. And while AIG made quite the dunce of itself playing around in MBS markets, that was their own private party. They eventually got themselves pinched in the twin vises of CDS's that they hadn't hedged a nickel on, and short-term assets swapped for longer-term notes that were suddenly non-marketable. They owed cash to everybody, everybody wanted their money back, and the company didn't have a dime. Their abject stupid behavior made them a house of straw in a forest fire alright, but AIG didn't create the forest fire. That was Wall Street.

You are buying the greed line entirely too much. The greed was in part because the belief was firmly placed that real estate could not go down appreciably. Government bought up and backed the market for the same reasons.
You are making me laugh. No one in the Wall Street loop thought they were doing the right thing. They all knew they were cheating by creating and selling notes that would fail. I'll be gone, you'll be gone. It will all be somebody else's problem. Strip off the profit, sell off the risk. The one thing they failed to anticipate was how long the opaque tentacles of systemic risk they were creating would turn out to be. When it all started to go wrong, the smart boys were left holding the short end of their own stick.

Ive got to ask, do you feel this is all due to Wall Street greed? I think there is plenty of blame to go around but you seem to be overly apologetic about government involvement in this whole mess and it seems to color your views on who shares the blame. I think its pretty much everyone. You seem to think its just the banks and wall street. Thanks in advance for clarification.
Blame belongs with those who earned it, and this blanket, well, we all contributed in some way or other is a big bunch of baloney. Tax cuts for the rich were a disaster. These were an automatic decrease in aggregate demand. The Fed announcing that it was freezing interest rates in the long-term was a disaster. Interest rates and asset prices are inversely related. What did anyone think would happen to housing prices? The Fed and SEC doing nothing as Wall Street started sopping up and passing on all that hopped-up paper from Countrywide et al. was a disaster. By late 2003, articles in scholarly and trade journals were already warning of a crisis when interest rates rose which of course they did between 2004 and 2006. Nobody paid any attention. Bush took leverage limits off of Wall Street and raised affordable housing targets again. What was he thinking? Greenspan said he was keeping a close eye on particularly the subprime situation and would take any appropriate action. Hah! They all stood around and encouraged the whole mess, and you wonder why analysts blame them?

The people who left their fingerprints on this mess were the Bushies who created the conditions for it, those who took knowing advantage of those conditions -- including brokers, the Wall Street Big Five, a bunch of appraisers who rightly felt they had to go along to get along if they were ever going to get work again, and the stupid bond rating agencies whose response to escalating demand was escalating shortcuts that provided no actual rating of securities at all. And then there were those in front of whom all this played out, and yet they did nothing. That would be the Bushies yet again.

Not responsible at all meanhwile were homeowners, homebuyers (including speculators), Carter, Clinton, Dodd, Frank, Pelosi, CRA, GLB, or CFMA. The GSE's we can point to a little bit, though late in the game and long after the horses were already out of the barn.
 
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Take the arrogance and stick it. We disagree about a lot of particulars, dont make it personal and dont bait.
You've been passing around nonsense as if you knew what you were talking about. Don't expect a lot of charity over that. It won't be forthcoming.

Im not sure how you are missing the massive increase in GSE inclusion in backing this process but you are missing it.
Increase? The GSE's were progressivly being cut out of the game. The Big Bypass was sucking up more and more business as private brokers pushed more and more high-cost, high-profit paper into the system. Bush was hitting the GSE's over the head trying to break them up into little pieces. His GSE czar scheme failed, and his cripple their portfolios scheme failed, but he finally did get them by discovering "questionable" accounting practices and having the SEC force them to redo their books. Would that Wall Street had gotten such attention. The result was that GSE market shares on both sides fell from early in the decade right through the ultimate debacle.

The regulation ended when Bush took office?
Active enforcement of CRA ended when Bush took office.

If you believe what you typed that I bolded, I dont know how you can believe both things. Thats you buying into political propaganda.
Terms defining a conforming loan were eased only slightly. This infuriated great American heroes such as Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide who was threatening Fannie Mae with taking all his prime business off to Wall Street as well if the GSE's didn't lower standards and start buying more garbage.

You are incorrect in credit growth as well. The increase in credit occurred because of the legislation allowing commercial and neighborhood banking to merge. It changed the entire leverage and margin picture for commercial and retail banking and was a primary source of problems that we are still trying to disentangle today. Thats part of what Dodd/Frank was supposed to address.
GLB was passed in 1999 and it changed two sections of Glass-Steagall, the net results of which was that banks, brokers, and insurance companies could all be operated under the same roof, and officers could serve in more than one such entity without automatically being guilty of a conflict of interest. Banks and brokerages had actually been operating under the same roof since the mid1980's. A year before the law changed, Citicorp and Travelers Insurance merged in direct violation of the law, and promptly received a Fed waiver for the deal. GLB may not have been a good idea, and it certainly contrbuted to the wave of rigged IPO's that shortly followed, but it was essentially a case of the law catching up with an already existing reality of a blended rather than a compartmentalized financial services sector. There was nothing here that led to the credit crisis of 2007. And the two sides by the way are are commerical banking and investment banking.

I see you are more interested in playing the blame Bush game. Which is what I suspected all along. You want to blame bankers and Bush while simultaneously claiming government had little blame. Thats about as contradictory as it gets.
Bush in actual fact screwed up a long list of things. History books will be blaming him for all this for centuries. You don't get a free pass for leaving town. You want him let off a hook or two? Point to a reason why he should be.

Dem pushback on GSE regulation was gigantic.
There was no Bush proposal for GSE regulation. All he wanted to do was kill them. There were bipartisan bills drafted in congress to modernize the safety-and-soundness regulation of the GSE's, but Bush killed them. The Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461) had passed the Republcian House by a vote of 331-90. It got the "one-finger salute" from the White House as Mike Oxley (Republican Chair of the Financial Services Committee) famously put it. The bill died. In the other chamber, the notorious S.190 "kill the GSE's" Bush bill was going nowhere at the time -- because there were not nearly enough Republican votes to pass it, even though they held a 55-45 majority. That's your Republican pushback in action there.

As I have said repeatedly, there is plenty of blame to go around and it covers almost everyone involved. You are interested in political finger pointing, not the truth of what really occurred. Oh well.
I'm interested in who screwed up what, and that was virtually all Republicans all the time. I am not interested in any counter-factual, oh-be-reasonable, blame-shifting scheme that tries to take blame away from where it actually belongs and put it where it actually doesn't belong. You've been rather active in this latter area.
 
Cardinal, the poster who's not supporting agenda and who's liberal apology is as pure as the driven snow.
Yes, your clock has been cleaned again. Poor fellow.

The CRA making sure FDIC Banks catered to the communities they served meant lowering standards under threat of massive fines....Wells Fargo.
LOL!!! Wells Fargo entered a settlement agreement for having discriminated against tens of thousands of minority credit applicants in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Fair Housing Act. These were not CRA-related loans. They were simply loans that blacks and hispanics had applied for. Do you really want to stand up for that kind of racism in America?

Otherwise, your rant and blah-blah isn't impressing me at all.
 
You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. You claim Bush cranked up GSE involvement then argue that the GSEs had nothing to do with it. Im done debating with someone whose base argument is dishonest.
You're done because you lack the factual and conceptual background needed to continue. Bush did indeed crank up affordable lending targets. That's a simple historical fact. Here is that history...

GSE_affordable_goals_1993-2008.jpg

Was that a clever idea to be calling for more and more low-income loans with a credit crisis already in progress? A lot of people would file that in the same folder as cutting leverage limits on the Wall Street Big Five in 2004. Not the brightest move ever.

But the GSE's still did not cause the crisis. That was born, grew up, and became termially ill between 2002 and 2006 as the rersult of more and more toxic waste being dumped into secondary mortgage markets by the Wall Street combine. The housing market peaked in the Spring of 2006, the rest was already a done deal. Home prices began to fall. Interest-rate triggers were kicking in all over town thanks to those exotic broker-driven loan terms. Defaults were on the rise and would soon lead major banks all over the world to take tens and hundreds of billions of mark-to-market losses as the global financial system threatened to unravel before our eyes. That's what Bush and the cowboy capitalists accomplished. The GSE's were bit players by comparison.
 
THATS Cardinal in a nut shell. He so determined to villify Bush he'll eventually contradict himself and rebut his own argument. Liberals ALL debate from a point of dishonesty. Otherwise they wouldn't have anything to say.
So many right-wing diatribes end in exactly this manner. Get your pants beat off, hurl some vague personal insult, declare victory, and then run away...

run_away.gif
 
Force? LOL! That was Clinton swagger. There is nothing in CRA that says anything at all about enforcement or about acquisitions or interstate operations. Even under deregulation, the latter did require a federal checkoff, so Clinton implied that banks with intentions in those areas better have an acceptable CRA rating if they expected their applications to be acted on expeditiously. There are no penalties of any sort included in CRA. There are no means of enforcing anything. What prompted expanded operations in previously underserved communities was the carrot of proven nice profits, not the stick of anything the feds could actually have done.

Yeah, shut up, stop spreading complete disinformation. Im going to quote the FRBSF.org website directly.

4. The federal banking agencies enforce the CRA by examining the CRA record of a bank, issuing a written report with a rating, and taking the bank’s CRA record into account when considering the bank’s application to expand its business.
As part of their regulatory function, the federal banking agencies periodically send examiners to a bank to determine whether it is in compliance with the banking laws, including the CRA. At the end of the CRA examination, the agency issues a written report describing its findings and containing one of four ratings: outstanding record of meeting community credit needs; satisfactory record; needs to improve; and substantial non-compliance. In addition to these periodic examinations, the federal banking agencies also evaluate certain bank expansion applications to ensure that the bank is capable of expanding and qualified to do so. One of the issues the agencies consider when a bank applies to expand its business is the bank’s CRA record. An agency may deny an application

10. Several other laws complement the CRA, including the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
The Fair Housing Act7 (FHA) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act8 (ECOA) are two important laws relating to lending in minority applicants and predominantly minority communities. They complement and supplement the CRA in coverage and enforcement. The FHA and ECOA are broader than the CRA in that they cover all lenders, not just banks. They also differ in the characteristics they protect: while the CRA focuses on income, the FHA and the ECOA protect against discrimination based on race, gender, and disability, among other characteristics. The CRA and ECOA cover all forms of credit, while the FHA covers housing-related credit transactions. Finally, while it is very difficult to enforce the CRA in court, the FHA and ECOA mandate strict penalties for violations, including monetary damages, and both can be enforced in court by private individuals or groups and by government agencies at the behest of private parties.

The teeth of CRA compliance had already moved to the courts and with suits brought by local community groups.

Secondly you argue both that the GSEs were decreasing in involvement and that Bush increased their targets, increasing their involvement.
 
So many right-wing diatribes end in exactly this manner. Get your pants

beat off, hurl some vague personal insult, declare victory, and then run away...

View attachment 67141005

You've never "beat my pants off" Cardinal and I've never run away from your lies and liberal mitigations.

your'e like a insolent child who sticks his fingers in his ears ." lalalalala"

You didn't answer my question. Why was credit so easy to obtain ?

Low interest rates had nothing to do with why credit was so easy to obtain.
 
Yeah, shut up, stop spreading complete disinformation. Im going to quote the FRBSF.org website directly.
Funnier than funny! Regulators who already existed and had actually been regulating financial institutions for decades before CRA came along were given an additional charge of preparing a report (OOOH!!!) indicating how well a bank or S&L was complying with the intents of CRA. There is no power to apply any punishment, no means for ordering any remedial action, in fact no type of code enforcement of any sort at all anywhere in CRA, but regulators might (even though they haven't) take a poor report card into consideration on those occasions when a particular institution might decide to apply to expand its business operations. Ouch!!!

The teeth of CRA compliance had already moved to the courts and with suits brought by local community groups.
Don't you think it's rather desperately weak to be blaming CRA for lawsuits brought under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974? These suits deal with illegal forms of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, and other long-proscribed factors. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the obligation of a bank or S&L that takes federal deposit insurance to make efforts to identify qualified borrowers within the communities it takes deposts from.

Secondly you argue both that the GSEs were decreasing in involvement and that Bush increased their targets, increasing their involvement.
Both statements are true, as has herein been documented. Sorry if you just can't process the facts.
 
Unemployment went back up. This is not a recovery.

Obama = worst president ever

In other words:
Down with the USA. I want the US to crash and burn. We need to learn our lesson. I want to see Obama fail and all people suffer.
 
You've never "beat my pants off" Cardinal and I've never run away from your lies and liberal mitigations.
Better to admit that it was my doing rather than your own, even though the latter has perhaps as often been the case.

your'e like a insolent child who sticks his fingers in his ears ." lalalalala"
No, I'm like an economist who has been working in these and related areas the whole time.

You didn't answer my question. Why was credit so easy to obtain ? Low interest rates had nothing to do with why credit was so easy to obtain.
You'd better explain this theory of yours to the FOMC. I'm afraid that they are sullying the centennial of their institution's founding by utterly failing to recognize or understand it.
 
In other words:
Down with the USA. I want the US to crash and burn. We need to learn our lesson. I want to see Obama fail and all people suffer.
Same sort of childish spoiled-bratism as sweeping all the checkers off the board once it becomes clear that one is losing. Nobody over age seven or so actually does that, but hey, look around this place...
 
Funnier than funny! Regulators who already existed and had actually been regulating financial institutions for decades before CRA came along were given an additional charge of preparing a report (OOOH!!!) indicating how well a bank or S&L was complying with the intents of CRA. There is no power to apply any punishment, no means for ordering any remedial action, in fact no type of code enforcement of any sort at all anywhere in CRA, but regulators might (even though they haven't) take a poor report card into consideration on those occasions when a particular institution might decide to apply to expand its business operations. Ouch!!!


Don't you think it's rather desperately weak to be blaming CRA for lawsuits brought under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974? These suits deal with illegal forms of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, and other long-proscribed factors. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the obligation of a bank or S&L that takes federal deposit insurance to make efforts to identify qualified borrowers within the communities it takes deposts from.


Both statements are true, as has herein been documented. Sorry if you just can't process the facts.

Dont you think its rock ****in stupid to ignore the fact that inner city community groups began filing suit in the mid 90s in response to CRA legislation to force banks to comply? Lawsuits that were ground for immediate denial of any expansion or aquisition request to the feds? The first was in Illinois and began in, I believe, 94 and Obama was on the legal team.

I just disputed bold by listing the actual regulatory power from the government website. So I guess we are left with a choice of believing your bull****, or believing corroboration of what Ive been saying all along. CRA regulation came from forcing compliance via the combination of CRA with equal lending rights, which was the intention all along. Denying aquisitions and expansions were actually the soft enforcement--the lawsuits were what cost the banks money.

You seem to be very keen to ignore the regulation. Its pretty obvious why.
 
Better to admit that it was my doing rather than your own
, even though the latter has perhaps as often been the case.


No, I'm like an economist who has been working in these and related areas the whole time.


You'd better explain this theory of yours to the FOMC. I'm afraid that they are sullying the centennial of their institution's founding by utterly failing to recognize or understand it.

Since your'e a objective "economist" working in "areas" I'm surprised youv'e completely missed the lower lending standards that fueled the sub-prime collapse.

Or are you simply trying to skirt the issue and not answer my question ? You know, since you make me run away or beat "the pants off me".

Actually NO liberal young or old has ever successfully beaten the pants off of me in a debate or otherwise.

Your typical example of winning a debate is always self exclaimed with you patting your self on the back because you managed to post multiple lies and misdirections and refused to answer pertinant questions.

Thats not a WIN, thats desperate.
 
Dont you think its rock ****in stupid to ignore the fact that inner city
community groups began filing suit in the mid 90s in response to CRA legislation to force banks to comply? Lawsuits that were ground for immediate denial of any expansion or aquisition request to the feds? The first was in Illinois and began in, I believe, 94 and Obama was on the legal team.

I just disputed bold by listing the actual regulatory power from the government website. So I guess we are left with a choice of believing your bull****, or believing corroboration of what Ive been saying all along. CRA regulation came from forcing compliance via the combination of CRA with equal lending rights, which was the intention all along. Denying aquisitions and expansions were actually the soft enforcement--the lawsuits were what cost the banks money.

You seem to be very keen to ignore the regulation. Its pretty obvious why.

No none of that happened...its just Right wing misdirection and their attempt at rewriting history.

The banks and the Koch Brothers did it....back in the early 90s.

CARDINAL will ignore anything that doesn't side with his agenda driven lies.
 
Dont you think its rock ****in stupid to ignore the fact that inner city community groups began filing suit in the mid 90s in response to CRA legislation to force banks to comply? Lawsuits that were ground for immediate denial of any expansion or aquisition request to the feds? The first was in Illinois and began in, I believe, 94 and Obama was on the legal team.
Problem: There is nothing to sue for under CRA. There is no tort that one could claim. Do you not understand the law at all? The problem in CRA for secret discriminators was that their CRA evaluations became public records that could be reviewed by -- the public, and those could provide hints and clues as to whether acts long illegal under other legislation might in fact have been committed. Poor ratings were also a liability in terms of bad publicity that could be generated about such lackluster institutions.

The case you have foolishly referred to was Buycks-Roberson v Citibank. It was filed in July 1994 alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Ms Buycks-Roberson had been twice denied a mortgage refinancing loan of $43,700. Her annual income at the time (1992) was $47,000. Unfortunately for the defendant in this case, the federal judge handling it ordered fairly broad discovery, and literally hundreds of cases of credit to blacks and others living in predominantly minority neighborhoods being denied were documented while the applications of similarly situated whites living in majority white neighborhoods were shown to have been routinely approved. Citibank suddenly saw the wisdom of entering into a consent decree under which, without admitting any guilt, they paid cash damages to the plaintiffs and others in their class, established an express lane for minority credit applications (including waiver of closing costs), and promised to change their credit review policies going forward. They also paid $900,000 in plaintiff's legal fees, of which Barack Obama -- the most junior of eight attorneys who worked on the case -- received $467.00.

I just disputed bold by listing the actual regulatory power from the government website.
There is no regulatory power listed. No order can be issued, no sanction or penalty can be applied. The absolute worst and most awful thing that can happen is that a poor rating might be considered (oh no, not THAT!) among other factors in the event that a covered institution sought federal approval for certain types of expansion in business operations.

So I guess we are left with a choice of believing your bull****, or believing corroboration of what Ive been saying all along.
No, I guess we are left with your stammering claims that a law that confirmed the affirmative responsibilty of certain banks and S&L's to make serious efforts to meet the credit needs of the communities they took deposits from was somehow far, far more than that. You should probably leave this sort of deceit to professional propagandists. You're kind of mangling it.
 
The ordered solution was greater compliance with CRA through greater contact and negotiation with community groups in urban areas where CRA was felt to be needed the most. If banks didnt play ball, they could have their CRA rating torched and even their access to federal rate loans would be in jeapordy.

You keep implying that there was no teeth and no regulation that enforced CRA, when I have already shown you sources that say they do. I guess we can agree to disagree at this point as have differing sources on what was going on.
 
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