Saturday, November 10, 2012
WHAT....WAS HE THINKING??????
In 2004, President Bush fully urged the Federal Housing Administration to eliminate all down-payment requirements (something in the past that had successfully been used to lessen the chance of defaults) for an additional 150,000 new homeowners. "To build an ownership society, we'll help even more Americans to buy homes. Some families are more than able to pay a mortgage but just don't have the savings to put money down."............Look, I have defended Bush on a number of occasions and, yes, he eventually did come to his senses on this (no less a liberal publication than the New York Times has credited President Bush with attempting to reign in the excesses of Fannie and Freddie, etc.) but, man, the fellow was certainly far off the mark earlier on with statements like these. Big time.
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17 comments:
Yep, there was sound reasoning behind the 20% down mentality. Not a great idea to screw with something that works.
Compassionate conservatism at work.
Of course, the financial collapse was primarily a creation of the progressives, with their CRA/etc policies that forced banks to make loans to people that could not pay them back: debt which the government then assumed. A situation which would not have happened at all if matters had been left to the free market, and been more laissez-faire.
After all, what bank would, on its own go out of its way to loan money to people who will never pay it back?
But as we see here, it wasn't only the progressives which encouraged this over-regulation; this intrusion into the free market. GWBush did this as well.
Exactly what policies were those, dmarks?
I still maintain that it was Alan Greenspan's idiotic interest rate policy which distorted the market and made people spend money largely in one direction and at a time when they should have been saving it, his manic printing of money, and his creation of a bailout culture that primarily caused the collapse.
Jerry: It is hardly a secret. Hereis a good article from a left-wing newspaper on how it started.
Will here has documented extensively about how Barney Frank fostered the mortgage meltdown and resisted any reform that would have prevented it. He kept insisting that the bad policies were no problem.
Will: Where would you put the terrible and unsustainable mortgage situation (thank you Barney Frank) on that list? #2? or #3?
And do you think that if we hadn't had the mortgage blowup, we might not have had the overall collapse?
And to think Greenspan was at one time a advocate of Rand. He should have ago progressing.
I would think that a true advocate of Rand who were put in charge of an incredibly powerful secretive mercurial government bank-control outfit, he would try to dismantle it.
Such entities don't like they fit in with any ideals of the libertarian/objectist/etc wing.
But as I am not in that wing, I readily admit the possibility that I could be wrong.
Fannie and Freddie bought up tens of billions in toxic loans from banks and various other lending institutions and, so, yeah, they definitely have to share in the blame here, dmarks.......Les, from what I can gather, Greenspan read Ayn Rand 40-50 years ago and it obviously didn't stick.
Ayn Rand is nothing but the philosophy of Neitzsche regurgitated and repackaged...I don't find Neitzsche's thought convincing and the same goes for Rand...
Systematizing of any kind (whether it be that of Rand, Keynes, or whoever), taken to its extreme, is generally problematic.
Will: I tend to agree with you...for example Keynesian methodology can be taken too far. From what I perceive, "Objectivists" demand "purity"....there is no moderating their extremism.
I don't know if you caught it but Lindsey Graham went on the talk show circuit this morning and he came out in favor of Bowles-Simpson AND comprehensive immigration reform. It really sounds like he wants to work with the President and hopefully he means it.
Not a problem for me. I am probably to the "left" of Obama on immigration.
Hey Will, take a swing over the Libertarian Republican and get a load of the crap that crowd is engaged in. Some really strange SMF's.
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