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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (65204)	1/31/2012 4:21:28 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

Re: "bottom line is the Fannie and Freddie fiasco...." What 'fiasco'? (The potential problems appertaining to "implicit" government guarantees for the debt of the PRIVATE mortgage agencies has existed since their very founding. It was something I studied about in college decades ago... old hat. A "bug waiting for a windshield to come along". An inevitability... only given enough time.) But the Agencies STILL were not the root cause of the "sub-prime bubble", (as they do not buy "sub-prime"... non-qualifying.) No, that particular bubble got launched on Well Street, among private I-banks who wanted to securitize larger and larger amounts of mortgage-backed paper and sell it to the world. And among the PRIVATE mortgage lenders who perpetrated knowing and willing fraud after fraud. And with the contrivance and slip-shod-if-not-outright-fraudulent "wink, wink, nudge nudge" of the ratings agencies and corrupt appraisers (mostly working for lenders) and the knowing and deliberate criminality of many individual loan applicants, and with the "stupider then ever" mantra of the Alan Greenspan years in Washington that "self-regulation is best" and that "derivatives should have all regulation by anyone banned" hanging over the whole mess. Yep... it took a PILE OF STUPID to make a mess like that big enough to rattle the entire world! (But the Agencies were but little causally connected.....)