Don't blame Bush; The Culprit Is All of Us (Congress, regular, environmentalists)

[sanrene]

The Culprit Is All of Us - Barrons.com

CONTRARY TO A VIEW POPULARIZED DURING THE 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation.

The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them.

Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.

The bipartisan Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 to prevent corporate fraud and restore investor confidence after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. It failed to prevent the accounting fraud and influence-peddling scandals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And even after those scandals were widely understood, regulators sent Fannie and Freddie back into the market to continue buying subprime loans, lending and borrowing with implied taxpayer backing.

Across the government, the Bush administration supported new regulations that added almost 1,000 pages a year to the Federal Register, nearly a record. If this is insufficient regulation, it's hard to imagine a scope that would be effective.

We are in this mess largely because critical thought and moral judgment have been subordinated to the politicization of our economy, resulting in regulatory gaps and excessive controls of the wrong kind.

Government regulations should be limited to those that increase and protect transparency and competition, protect public and private property, promote individual responsibility and enforce equal opportunity under the law. Even if the right laws and regulations could be found, they would prove insufficient to protect freedom and prosperity.

A very good article spelling out exactly what happened that resulted in this financial mess.

Some of you on here should really read this article - educate yourselves.

[evilnewbie]

I don't blame just Bush (but he is at fault as well)... I blame PLENTY of people... idiots, greedy regular people, congress, CEOs, banks, socialists, populists, capitalists, environmentalists.... actually come to think of it, there is actually a shorter list of people who I don't blame...

[Roaddog]

your right, it is everybodies fault, except me that is I didn't run out and buy a house I couldn't afford or refinance so I could buy that new RV and I warned my friends and relitives not to either but you know what? almost everyone of them did and now they point at everyone but themselves for their problem. Theres plenty of blame to go around.
I actually blame the people for most of it, for their greed and having to get things they couldn't afford.

[delusianne]

The result was an environment in which official Washington seemed to believe that no home loan could be a bad home loan. "What we did and what we started was not just to push banks to make marginal loans, but to give them an excuse and to give them regulatory cover," said [Phil Gramm]. "Countrywide became HUD's poster child for what a good lender was like." - piece on Phil in Time magazine

That kind of regulation?

About Fannie and Freddie, Phil said they "were simply part of a decades-long, bipartisan push — from Capitol Hill, the White House, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and even bank regulators — for ever more mortgage lending on ever easier terms. "

Foreclosure Phil's solution? "[T]ougher mortgage regulation."

Heckuva job with those 1,000 pages, GWB! And noble revisionist effort there, Barrons.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by sanrene

The Culprit Is All of Us - Barrons.com
Some of you on here should really read this article - educate yourselves.

So I guess the conservative principal of "Personal responsability" only applies to liberals?

Who the ..... was in charge of the US government the last 8 years?
That is the person that we need to blame.