The heart of this failure came from a mandate by members of Congress from both parties that demanded easier loan terms for marginally-qualified buyers. At first, this meant working-class families, but it also resulted in easier terms all the way through to the highest income levels. Lower qualifiers meant more buyers, and buyers buying bigger houses. The net effect of this was to create a much higher demand for housing and for mortgages.

Any attempt to regulate this was consistently blocked by Democrats in Congress because it would have restricted lending to low income and minority households as well. That is simply a fact that people wish to ignore because as long as people are willing to perceive Republicans and Capitalism as the culprit, the public will allow more socialism to creep in.

This is the same type of oversight that is only now recommended by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, as they hope the media doesn’t bring up the fact that they were the ones who opposed it in 2003 and 2005.

Jimmy, you’re just going to keep blaming everyone except those who deserve it, aren’t you?

While the Community Reinvestment Act didn’t help, and while the Dems deserve some blame for poor oversight, these relatively paltry loans for inner city homeowners you are talking about are not the cause of this crisis and you either know it and are lying or don’t want to know it so you can continue spinning your fantasy.

Community Reinvestment Act banks were substantially less likely than other lenders to make the kinds of risky home purchase loans that helped fuel the foreclosure crisis.

The Community Reinvestment Act loans of which you speak
constituted only 23% of all loans and 9.2% of high-cost loans.

Community Reinvestment Act loans were twice as likely to be retained in the originating bank’s portfolio than loans made by other institutions–that means they were not resold and were not part of the problem that has created this crisis.

Community Reinvestment Act loans were less likely to be foreclosed upon than other loans.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good partisan lie….

Read this amazing article from the New York times circa 1999. It predicted the whole fiasco:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

McQ at QandO has a good take on it here

So here we have the ‘free market’, as some would like to claim, enacting social policy through a quasi-government company who has the backing of the government to do precisely what that government wanted it to do.

They felt they could market these securities as AAA ratings because they were told that the government had their backs. Everytime someone tried to set up oversight as these organizations took on trillions of debt, Do-gooders in Congress fought hard to stop it because it interfeared with their social engineering. See Barney Frank.

Free market? Hardly. And having an agency set up to assess risk and oversee that those ratings were accurate?(As the Bush administration requested in 2003) Hardly socialsm.