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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (173141)	12/23/2008 1:52:14 AM
From: Schnullie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

nobody said the democrats weren't bought and paid for, IN ADDITION to the republicans led by bush. Oh yes they did. Check out some of BentBrainz rantz (god I hope he's sleeping....or otherwise constructively engaged in Tijuana). It was ALL Bush! sez 'Brainz, playing to the adoring masses. you claimed bush was some innocent here I did not claim that Bush was an innocent. I said he was much further down on my list than a number of other political low-lives (starting with Al Greenslime). This in response, once again, to some of the hopelessly overstated views of certain parties here regarding culpability(please please be asleep). I did concede that Bush was a dullard and a dolt, even if such stuff has become -let's face it - really tiresome and humorless. Below is a snatch from the White House response to yesterday's NY Times article on housing meltdown culpability. Again, I am not a Bush supporter. I do appreciate analysis from both sides of the table. And I do agree that both sides were deeply responsible for the mess. See if you can refute the points presented below. In fact, the Times' article ignored a wealth of its own reporting, dating back to the era of Bill Clinton, whom the article mentioned only once, in passing. For example, in September 1999, the Times noted that, "Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits." The 1999 piece went even further: "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times," the Times noted presciently. "But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's." Likewise, the Times made no mention over the weekend of President Clinton's aggressive deregulation of the financial services industry, which empowered banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies to engage in some of the very practices -- such as credit default swaps -- that contributed most to the current fiscal crisis. While the Times mentioned that mortgage bankers and brokers donated almost $850,000 to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, the newspaper omitted the fact that the top three recipients of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and its sister organization Freddie Mac over the last two decades were all Democrats. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, head of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; President-elect Barack Obama; and Bush's 2004 opponent John Kerry all benefited from Fannie and Freddie. ok,- that's enough from me on this subject. Goin' away.