WEIRD, YOUR LINK SAYS
'Bush's top economist, Gregory Mankiw, warned: "The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole." He too proposed reforms, and they too went nowhere.'
WHY DID BUSH DO THIS THEN
'June 17, 2004
Home builders, realtors and others are preparing to fight a Bush administration plan that would require Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase financing of homes for low-income people, a home builder group said Thursday.
Home builders fight Bush's low-income housing - Jun. 17, 2004
"(In 2000, CLINTON) HUD restricted Freddie and Fannie, saying it would not credit them for loans they purchased that had abusively high costs or that were granted without regard to the borrower's ability to repay."
How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis
"In 2004 9BUSH) , the 2000 rules were dropped and high‐risk loans were again counted toward affordable housing goals."
http://business.gwu.edu/creua/research-papers/files/fannie-freddie.pdf
SO THE DEMS ARE TO BLAME BECAUSE THE GOP COULDN'T BRING UP A VOTE IN 2005 ON A WATERED DOWN GSE REFORM BILL THAT PASSED WITH BIPARTISAN SUPPORT IN THE GOP MAJORITY HOUSE? WEIRD
Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.
OOPS
OH RIGHT THAT WAS THE DEMS FAULT *shaking head*
Freddie Mac's Secret Plan To Kill Reform - CBS News
One president controlled the regulators that not only let banks stop checking income but cheered them on. And as president Bush could enact the very policies that caused the Bush Mortgage Bubble and he did. And his party controlled congress.
Bush talked about reform. He talked and he talked. And then he stopped reform.
The critics have forgotten that the House passed a GSE reform bill in 2005 that could well have prevented the current crisis, says Mr Oxley, now vice-chairman of Nasdaq.”
“What did we get from the White House? We got a one-finger salute.”
Oxley was Chairman of the House Financial Services committee and sponsor of the only reform bill to pass any chamber of the republican controlled congress
TIMELINE:
The "turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007," the President's Working Group on Financial Markets OCT 2008
Regulators and policymakers enabled this process at virtually every turn. Part of the reason they failed to understand the housing bubble was willful ignorance: they bought into the argument that the market would equilibrate itself. In particular, financial actors and regulatory officials both believed that secondary and tertiary markets could effectively control risk through pricing.
http://www.tobinproject.org/sites/tobinproject.org/files/assets/Fligstein_Catalyst of Disaster_0.pdf
OOPS
