You also had a law passed in the Carter years to make it easier for people who couldn't (and as we can now see, shouldn't) have been granted a mortgage provided one. This law got itself teeth during the Clinton years to aggressively push these high risk mortgages out there, or the banks would suffer fines. All of this backed up by federally created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who then started bundling these high risk loans with AAA credit loans. All the while, anything that had once been considered wise lending practices were thrown out the window.
This is horseshit. This is the "blame the poor minorities and the liberals who thought they should be subject to the same standards as everyone else" canard that was trotted out after the collapse to try to divert blame away from the deregulation that is the real obvious cause -- point of fact, even if this bull excrement explanation held any water, had the old rules about the types of securities banks could invest in and the limits to their ability to leverage were in place, the collapse wouldn't have happened.
The law never required banks to make risky loans. It only required them to not refuse loans based solely on where someone lived, or to use a higher standard to secure the loan than they would for someone who lived somewhere else.
My bank was subject to the same law, and while so much of the financial sector was collapsing it was fine, because it didn't make risky loans, and it didn't invest in CDOs because the board was smart enough to realize what a crock of shit their ratings were.
The people who got mortgages but shouldn't weren't just the poor, but the middle class getting mortgages far beyond what they could afford. Not every middle class family should buy a McMansion, but that's not what the loan officers were saying. They knew the loan was risky (or didn't know but didn't care), but they also knew they could turn right around and sell the loan to someone who would package it up with a bunch of others, slap a completely fanciful risk rating on it, and then sell it again to some sap, aka Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Citibank, and all the others who had to be bailed out.
The only policies that were pushed that caused this disaster are the deregulation The-Free-Market-Knows-Best policies that the banks themselves were pushing for.
Oh and as far as taking -- the government may be the only one authorized to take in the form of taxes, but the government is only taking a percentage of earnings. When the bankers, in their irresponsible greed, trashed the economy and cost millions their jobs, so they had no earnings. Despite not having the authority, the banks took more than the government did.
The protesters know who is to blame. The bankers are not middlemen in this mess.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/mFEpwVRMGhg/end-bonuses-for-bankers
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