Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The Real Deal
So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault
The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap
Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively
Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
Not all lefties support the Democratic party and/or certain of it's politicians and policies, lock-step.
I know, I know... when one is in lock-step, blindly following their own party, it's pretty difficult to wrap one's brain around the fact that not everyone else behaves that way, but there it is...
Maybe if you all backed off from idolizing Unca Ronnie and so forth, you'd see that not everyone has a weak backbone such that they need to shore up their convictions with a political icon(s).
As a "lefty" I want each and every politician held responsible if they misbehave, regardless of party.
Also, I think some of you didn't have logic class. Familiarize yourselves with Ad Hominem Tu Quoque.
Basically, what that logical fallacy amounts to is a red herring, intended to distract people from the actual topic.
It's like when your brother got caught doing something wrong, and he immediately came out with "But, but mom... he did it too!"
Can you imagine if our justice system ran that way?
One of the things missing from your post is that Republicans did call for more oversight and regulaton of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but the Democrats in control claimed that there was no problem.
Barney Frank, Maxene Waters, Chuck Schumer, and many others flately denied any problems.
What's even more morally repugnant is how authority can use those subordinate to them as a human shield from the law by shifting blame. Despicable cowardice to abuse our troops that way. CIA agents allowed to say no to anything? Above the law themselves?
Bush admin rewrote law to protect themselves from liability and blame shift. I still for the life of me cannot understand why the justice dept was sleeping at the wheel over all of these issues. Maybe attorney general position needs to be more independent from executive branch?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
