Conservative propaganda re:CRA/Fannie debunking site

[Narkos]

Check this out....very, very good stuff.

http://howdidthishappen.org/

[wryter2000]

1. K&R

Awesome site. Thanks. :yourock:

[JohnWxy]

2. Nobody on M$M will mention the "D" word: "DEREGULATION" even after huncreds of hours describing the

sickness our economy suffers from they will not tell people the CAUSE of the sickness: DEREGULATION.

go here for more on Phil Gramm's sponsorship of the two bills that created the unregulated trade in Credit Default Swaps and Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) Phil Gramm couldn't get the Commodities Futures Modernization Act passed openly, it went down to defeat twice before, so he slipped it in as RIDER to the ONMIBUS SPENDING BILL of 2000. Nobody in Congress even knew it was in there! THe CFMA not only lead to this Credit disaster but created the Enron Loophole which enabled the Enron Debacle costing Californians billions of dollars.

The abuses which lead to this Credit Disaster were enabled by Gramm's two bills. Gramm you'll remember was the guy who said: "America is having a mental recession." and "America has become a nation of whiners."

He is McCain's chief economic advisor and is McCains choice to be Secretary of the Treasury if the Republicans can get enough voting machines programmed "Right".

link on why McCain would like us to forget the last 8 years with a link to Foreclosure Phil

Thank you for the Excellent link provided. RECOMMENDED.

from the site you recommended:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/opinion/18barr.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

The second claim from advocates of deregulation is that the roots of the current crisis lie in efforts to encourage Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do more to help low- and moderate-income homeowners. The assertion is that Democrats encouraged financial recklessness by insisting that Fannie and Freddie fulfill their congressionally mandated public purposes by expanding access to home mortgage loans to non-creditworthy borrowers. But again, the argument is not supported by the facts.

The Clinton administration explicitly discouraged Fannie and Freddie from buying predatory subprime loans. A report on predatory lending in 2000 from a task force formed by the Treasury Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development called for Congress to enact legislation to “prohibit the purchase by each of these entities of predatory loans.”

Furthermore, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Gary Gensler, an undersecretary of the Treasury, were severely criticized by the Republican Congress in 1999 and 2000 when they called for reforms to address the systemic risk from Fannie and Freddie and to reconsider their government line of credit. When the Clinton administration left office, the two mortgage firms were still bit players in the subprime market.

[JohnWxy]

3. Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs when the W.S. banks appealed to SEC for looser risk regulation.

http://howdidthishappen.org/facts

But Alan Greenspan and conservatives in Congress, led by Phil Gramm, encouraged the development of these risky new products, and blocked them from regulation. Greenspan said, “it seems superfluous” to regulate derivatives, and Gramm quietly slipped his Commodities Futures Modernization Act into a must-pass budget bill in 2000 to ensure the highly risky derivatives market would not be regulated.

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Bills trying to institute common-sense regulation to discourage banks from engaging in some of the risky lending practices that led to the current crisis were frequently introduced. One such amendment was offered in 1999, 2001, and 2005, and defeated by conservatives each time.

As risky lending exploded, the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress ignored and enabled Wall Street’s reckless behavior.

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Under conservative leadership, the Securities and Exchange Commission turned a blind eye as the credit-default swaps market ballooned under its nose, going from essentially zero in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2005 to over $60 trillion in 2007.<2>

In fact, in 2004, the SEC actively abetted greater risk-taking on the part of the big Wall Street investment banks by allowing them to more than triple their so-called “leverage ratio” to 40-to-1 debt-to-equity levels, up from 12-to-1 levels. This change enabled these banks (Bear Stearns Cos., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., and Morgan Stanley) to indulge in the highly irresponsible borrowing practices that led all five of them this year to either go bankrupt, sell themselves to a bigger bank holding company, or convert themselves into a bank holding company to avoid collapse.<3>

The CEO of Goldman Sachs who was at the meeting where they lobbied the SEC for looser risk assumption regulation was Henry Paulson, Jr.