Legal Commentary

Fineman: It's Clinton's Fault

By Big Tent Democrat

I kid you not. Just now Howard Fineman said that Bill Clinton was to blame "because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were securitizing mortgages." What stunning ignorance.

Hell Howard, let's blame FDR while you are at it:

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Or maybe LBJ:

In 1968, due to fiscal pressures created by the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson privatized Fannie Mae in order to remove it from the national budget. At this point, Fannie Mae began operating as a GSE, generating profits for stock holders while enjoying the benefits of exemption from taxation and oversight as well as implied government backing. In order to prevent any further monopolization of the market, a second GSE known as Freddie Mac was created in 1970. Currently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control about 90 percent of the nation's secondary mortgage market.

What exactly is Fineman blaming Clinton for? I have no freaking clue. Fineman is repeating the racist GOP attack on the CRA:

It was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions. Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."

Amazing how Bill Clinton's 1994 initiative did not blow up until 14 years later isn't it? Of course this is utter racist hogwash. Barney Frank has debunked it:

And Howard Fineman repeats this racist GOP BS. What a hack.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).