Who's the skunk in the room. Well Jimmy Carter gave us the Ayatollahs controlling Iran, and his initiative enabled this mortgage crisis to develop. The politicians providing "bread and circuses" to their constituents are the ones who should be in the slammer for setting up this crisis.
When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were instructed to package "bad loans" made pursuant to the CRA, created during the Carter administration, the fuse was lit and the explosives would inevitably eventually detonate.
The compulsion to make bad loans to "under-served" (read unable to afford and make payments on debt) minorities was bad enough. There were restraints as there was no market for the loans. Then when Fannie and Freddie were directed to reduce the standards for acquiring and packaging loans, the fat was in the fire.
There had been restraint when there was no mechanism to cash in. Once the market was available for bad loans, the incentive to make bad loans was there and the entrepreneurs became active marketers of the questionable but valuable negotiable paper.
BOOM. BOOM. Comes the explosion of the credit markets with all of this paper that transmuted into non-performing status, circulating.
Who established the situation? Why the leftist ideologues who contrived this "something for nothing" scheme as if providing people with loans they could not service was conferring a boon on them. Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Dodd, and others "investigating the problem," had shortly before the crisis emerged, made declarations concerning the solvency of Fannie and Freddie. The foxes are pretending that they are not the ones who were in the henhouse. The great leftist deceivers still proceed under the delusion that fiat can make an economy operate. And they are either so dense, or so depraved and lacking in integrity that they are trying to shift blame for the failures they orchestrated.
The lament of leftists that they were just trying to help the poor, is presented as an excuse for their cupidity. Their model of how the economy operates will provide a prototype for future economic disasters. It was too much government intervention, politicians commanding that bad loans be made and providing a market for them, that led to this debacle.
Whatever became of "tarring and feathering" and riding politicians out of town on a rail? Or is that purported practice just an urban myth? Jimmy Carter should at least be disgraced with some type of "Ig-noble Award" for his participation in creating the Iran problem and in the genesis of the current financial crisis. Foreign policy and domestic problems can be traced back to arguably the worst President in the history of this great country. But a competitor, Obama, waits in the wings for an opportunty to display his abilities in forging misbegotten policies.
