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Oversight: Congressman Barney Frank says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. And we couldn't agree more. First up in the court dock: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
Even by the extraordinarily loose standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he'll seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crunch and for what he called "a strongly empowered systemic risk regulator."
For Frank, perhaps more than any single individual in private or public life, is responsible for both the housing market mess and ......Mod cut-copyright issues
Users, please click on link to see the rest of this article.
These people don't deal in facts. Facts are a nuisance to them, and they get in the way of advancing their agenda.
Liberals always seek to get a jump on the real facts before they surface so that when they do, they can dismiss them as rumors, lies, or simply Republican propaganda, especially if carried only on Fox News or shows like Rush Limbaugh. This is why they are carefully prevented from showing up on any mainstream media source.
Precisely why Democrat administrations always give their daily talking points to their favorite lackeys in the mainstream media, to make sure the news is spun in a way that puts them in a positive light. Stephanopoulos denies this (of course).
Last edited by nononsenseguy; 03-07-2009 at 02:09 PM..
These people don't deal in facts. Facts are a nuisance to them, and they get in the way of advancing their agenda.
Liberals always seek to get a jump on the real facts before they surface so that when they do, they can dismiss them as rumors, lies, or simply Republican propaganda, especially if carried only on Fox News or shows like Rush Limbaugh. This is why they are carefully prevented from showing up on any mainstream media source.
Precisely why Democrat administrations always give their daily talking points to their favorite lackeys in the mainstream media, to make sure the news is spun in a way that puts them in a positive light. Stephanopoulos denies this (of course).
I'm trying to find something in your post that's wrong....but I can't.
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
Last edited by Reads2MUCH; 03-08-2009 at 12:43 PM..
So a GOP controlled congress was blocked by the minority party? Is that what you are leading us to believe?
I mean, lets not let facts get in the way or anything...
Why not...you sure seem to be willing to let facts get in the way.
Fact: the GOP didn't have a large enough majority to outvote the dems...who spent the last 6 years of the Bush administration blocking nearly every piece of legislation put forth by the GOP. After 2004, too many GOPer's decided to become dem-lite. What do you think the 2006 election was all about?
Fact: as was just illustrated by the vote in the Senate on the porkulus bill, not all Republicans are conservatives. It's also the reason the right didn't want McCain as the nominee....but boy!..the dems and the MSM sure did!
Why not...you sure seem to be willing to let facts get in the way.
Fact: the GOP didn't have a large enough majority to outvote the dems...who spent the last 6 years of the Bush administration blocking nearly every piece of legislation put forth by the GOP. After 2004, too many GOPer's decided to become dem-lite. What do you think the 2006 election was all about?
Fact: as was just illustrated by the vote in the Senate on the porkulus bill, not all Republicans are conservatives. It's also the reason the right didn't want McCain as the nominee....but boy!..the dems and the MSM sure did!
My link covers it man, do you not care about the truth and only want to take part in a smear campaign?
Quote:
It's true that key Democrats opposed the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 , which would have established a single, independent regulatory body with jurisdiction over Fannie and Freddie – a move that the Government Accountability Office had recommended in a 2004 report. Current House Banking Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts opposed legislation to reorganize oversight in 2000 (when Clinton was still president), 2003 and 2004, saying of the 2000 legislation that concern about Fannie and Freddie was "overblown." Just last summer, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd called a Bush proposal for an independent agency to regulate the two entities "ill-advised."
But saying that Democrats killed the 2005 bill "while Mr. Obama was notably silent" oversimplifies things considerably. The bill made it out of committee in the Senate but was never brought up for consideration. At that time, Republicans had a majority in the Senate and controlled the agenda. Democrats never got the chance to vote against it or to mount a filibuster to block it.
By the time McCain signed on to the legislation, it was too late to prevent the crisis anyway. McCain added his name on May 25, 2006, when the housing bubble had already nearly peaked. Standard & Poor's Case-Schiller Home Price Index, which measures residential housing prices in 20 metropolitan regions and then constructs a composite index for the entire United States, shows that housing prices began falling in July 2006, barely two months later.
And no, this isn't partisan hyperbole or historical exaggeration.
Yes, it is. The entire piece is bunk. The GSE's played minor roles in bringing about the credit crunch. That was born and raised on Wall Street. Here's how...
The Community Reinvestment Act had nothing at all to do with the crisis. The resistance of Barney Frank and others to Republican plans to wedge the GSE's out of secondary markets and out of affordable housing programs had nothing to do with the crisis.
The crisis was brought on by the egregious excesses of a bunch of Wall Street cowboy capitalists in pursuit of short-term profit at any cost, and a bunch of laissez-faire regulators who blindly (and quite wrongly) assumed that the free market was wise enough to regulate itself.
Last edited by saganista; 03-08-2009 at 01:28 PM..
Yes, it is. The entire piece is bunk. The GSE's played minor roles in bringing about the credit crunch. That was born and raised on Wall Street. Here's how...
The Community Reinvestment Act had nothing at all to do with the crisis. The resistance of Barney Frank and others to Republican plans to wedge the GSE's out of secondary markets and out of affordable housing programs had nothing to do with the crisis.
The crisis was brought on by the egregious excesses of a bunch of Wall Street cowboy capitalists in pursuit of short-term profit at any cost, and a bunch of laissez-faire regulators who blindly (and quite wrongly) assumed that the free market was wise enough to regulate itself.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
There are video clips and audio clips galore that prove your scenario is a total lie:
The above contain documentable facts. Are you going to try to refute them, or be a good little libby and attack the sources and the messenger?
Thats what I was saying to you, yet you only present have the story. Did you click fact check that I posted above.
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