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-- The Obama thread - Without flaming!
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| Originally posted by Skipper Low interest rates didn't cause the subprime mess. It was the lenders, who have total control over the terms of the agreement and the rates they charge. |
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| Originally posted by SniFFleS NO, most mortgages are variable which will fluctuate with Fed's lending rate. The lenders would have never came up with those obscene lending practices if the rates were not low for so long. The lenders are stupid too yes, but they obviously couldn't predict the Feds retarded monetary policy. The point being, there would have been no bubble if the government and fed did not interfere in the 2002 recession. There should have been a more natural, longer recession in 2002 after the tech bubble. |
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| Originally posted by Skipper You CANNOT blame the government interest rate for bank lending policies. That is ridiculous. Lenders have absolute free will when deciding whether to offer fixed or variable. Low interest rates are nothing new. |
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| Originally posted by SniFFleS The new deal came out in 1932 , the great depression lasted until 1939 and ended because of Hitler. The new deal pretty much just got the government involved in everything. Roosevelt also increased tariffs, which is a horrible move. He pretty much tried to keep prices high when the depression was trying to bring prices back down to reasonable levels, he kept interfering and invoked price controls. That's why it lasted so long, the recession was the cure for the overinflated market/economy of before the crash. It's actually similar to what we see now, if Obama wants to keep prices high and stop home prices from falling then this recession is going to last a long time. |
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| Originally posted by DigiNut Well, that's not quite true. I blame about 80% of it on the lenders, but certain "anti-discrimination" policies at the fed level made it very difficult for them to turn down credit risks. As interest rates continued to fall, this would have become a more and more significant problem. Don't start with how I always defend corporate America and all that - like I said, I blame almost all of it on the financials, but certain aspects of the lending policies were a factor. People are just reluctant to mention them for fear of being labeled, shall we say, prejudiced. Eventually the bubble would have burst anyway, but without that factor it could have taken another 3-5 years for it to happen, maybe more. |
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| Originally posted by spolitta wow, Your version of the history is even more biased than the myth. The Myth says the government did little or not enough. The person who told you the government did nothing didn't have a slightest clue. In fact hoover tried many things which all failed, and when Roosevelt came he did a lot more under the new deal and spent a lot of money compare to the size of the economy at the time, those were all big failures too. But you think the depression would have been much longer if the government didn't do anything? Maybe 20 years? Nobody likes to answer this question because the recession that was due in the 1929 was much smaller than what we are going through now and yet with all the government spending it lasted 10 years. So by that standards the current recession should really take over 20 or most likely 30 years if the government were to do nothing!? As for the regulation, the world isn't black & white, let me explain why you are so misinformed. You simply think all the regulations are "GOOD" so more regulation is better. But unfortunately things don't work like that in the real world. There are good regulations and bad regulations, so arguing we need more regulation is premature and it's a thing of media to exaggerate. If you had a friend in the wallstreet he would tell you that there are tons of regulations or some say they are even over regulated. It's not the regulation that solves our problems, the free market will regulate itself when needed, the bad regulation is what got us into this mess NOT the LACK of REGULATION. You cannot regulate greed. Greed is part of the free market which exists and it always will. You cannot regulate greed unless you go fully after it which in that case you will only do more harm than good. Wallstreet is not to be blamed for the current financial crisis. I know average person like myself doesn't like bankers and wallstreet in general but they really aren't to be blamed, I'll explain why. Think about everybody who bought an overpriced house in the past years speculating that the prices will always go up. Think about people who bought houses which they knew they couldn't afford but they thought the house will appreciate so much that at the end it would still be worth it. The prices of houses cannot possibly go up at that rate forever, so when you pay for an overpriced house you are speculating just like when a stock market investor buys a stock %20 up of its recent lows speculating it will go up another %20 in the coming months or years. We are all responsible for our own financial actions, so yes we are held responsible when we ignore the risks we take. The risk home buyers took by buying overpriced houses thinking the prices will always go up is no different than the bad loans wallstreet made, but these are the consequences of the problem not the the problem itself, lets play a little analogy game. Imagine there is a birthday party of a teen boy and all his friends from his school and an adult relative bring a bottle of Absolute Vodka for the boys and leaves. Although one of the mothers is present at the party to have an oversight she spends most of her time reading books and doesn't pay much attention to the kids thinking the boys are just having normal fun. At some point during the party the kids will drink the alcohol knowing what it is and the day after all the parents are extremely angry at what happened so who do you blame? The kids who knew it was alcohol but drank it anyway? The mother who was supposed to look after the kids but spent most of her time reading? or the idiot who brought the Vodka to the party in the first place? It was the government of the united states that kept the interest rates so low for so long to fight the dot com and 9/11 recessions. It was the government who created Fanny and Freddi and promoted their business model and sent the wrong signal to the market. It was the government distorting the market all along and caused this giant mess not the free market, so government cannot possibly solve our problem by doing more of the same. I know some people think of bankers running wild when they hear the term free market, but that's wrong. Free market is me you and everybody else including the bankers which can regulate itself when needed. You cannot control greed for the same reason as why Santa Clause doesn't exist. |
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| Originally posted by DigiNut I like how you've already set it up in your mind such that he can't possibly fail of his own volition. If he doesn't live up to the hype, it'll be the fault of the corporations and power brokers, and would obviously have nothing to do with him making promises he can't possibly keep, for example, or having near-zero experience with economic and social policy, or just making poor choices in office. |
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| Originally posted by feelgood Remember the phrase "10% of the population own 90% of the money? (paraphrased)" How is it that a healthy middle class can drive the economy. You clearly havent ever been in an emergency room in Canada, or had a relative who's needed surgery, or a friend needing cancer treatment. Three things of which i have experienced first hand, and can firmly say that our health care system is trash. Why does Jack Layton go to a private hospital in the states if our medicare is so good? At least in the states, if i want health care i can get it right now if i pay for it. Anyways.. we'll discuss healthcare someother time. |
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| Originally posted by Skipper You CANNOT blame the government interest rate for bank lending policies. That is ridiculous. Lenders have absolute free will when deciding whether to offer fixed or variable. Low interest rates are nothing new. When it comes down to giving a loan or not, that is not done by the US government. The buck stops with the lenders. |
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| Originally posted by infinity HiGH Way to make shit up. |
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| Originally posted by infinity HiGH ...but in the end he'll be a politician with his hands tied up by various corporations and other powerful individuals. |
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| Originally posted by darcnight I'm all for good regulation. the current crisis is a result of next to NO REGULATION on the misguided belief that the "market" will correct itself...well, we're in the middle of one hell of a "correction" that could have been avoided had they stuck with GOOD REGULATION. |
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| Originally posted by darcnight true, america has a vast web of systemic racism |
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| ...but you dont solve it by saying "lend them all money"...you solve it by making sure that whoever is applying has the means to pay it, regardless of the colour of their skin...or their zip code. |
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| Originally posted by darcnight And yes...you CAN control greed, by having laws...sort of like in everyday society...ppl dont run around robbing banks everyday because they know they'll go to jail for it... |
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| Originally posted by DigiNut No. Yes, I agree completely. Unfortunately that's not what happened. What happened was a kind of quasi-affirmative-action lending policy. That law does not exist to "control greed", it exists to protect other citizens' private property rights. And that is what laws are supposed to be for - to protect the rights of citizens from others who would violate them. If you believe that laws exist merely to control behaviour that you dislike then you are... well... a fascist. I don't condone greed, per se, but as long as it's not criminal then we have no pretense to try and legislate against it. |
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| Originally posted by SniFFleS So your saying that lenders created this bubble and that if rates were at normal levels the same thing would have happen? Rates were low, people took mortgages, rates went up people could not afford them anymore. Its really that simple! Why were rates low? Bush wanted to get re-elected and avoid a major recession in 02. |
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| Originally posted by Skipper Mortgage rates are not set by the government. Rates went up for people who couldn't afford them because of the way the loans were designed, with periodic reset dates. Many mortgages never charged prime to begin with - they charged nothing for an extended period of time, then when the reset date rolled around, they charged 3x prime. |
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| Originally posted by devnull The lending practices in the US are a mess. No background checks, no income verification, predatory practices, teaser rates. Basically, the lending institutions would offer super low rates to people who cant afford mortgages. Fannie/Freddie buys the mortgages and turns them into derivatives (Mortgage backed securities). Around 2006-2007, the teaser rates started expiring, jumping to levels making the homeowners unable to pay their mortgages. Foreclosures start and cause the bubble to burst. House values in the surroundings start dropping, thus killing the so called equity that pple were supposed to make by buying the houses....pple end up having mortgages worth more than the house....leading to more foreclosures and the spiral goes on. Homeowners are unable to renegotiate mortgage plans because the origninal mortgage with the institutional lenders have been converted into securities....which investors are not willing to renegotiate ... therefore homeowners are fucked. Then you have wall street shitting their pants cuz they were deep into buying/trading mortgage backed securities that have gone worthless (lehman brothers failed cuz it was so deep) and it keeps spiralling..... so for those who say regulation was not a problem.....what are you smoking! how can you justify such lending practices, i mean it's COMMON SENSE before lending hundreds of grands to verify the ability to repay. Then you have companies like freddie/fannie who have been led by crooks for years and cooked the books slept with congress through millions in lobbying (mostly to democrats....Barney Frank!) and doing everything in their power to prevent oversight and regulation against them see http://www.ofheo.gov/media/pdf/FNMSPECIALEXAM.PDF |
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| Originally posted by Skipper Mortgage rates are not set by the government. Rates went up for people who couldn't afford them because of the way the loans were designed, with periodic reset dates. Many mortgages never charged prime to begin with - they charged nothing for an extended period of time, then when the reset date rolled around, they charged 3x prime. |
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| Originally posted by Skipper Mortgage rates are not set by the government. Rates went up for people who couldn't afford them because of the way the loans were designed, with periodic reset dates. Many mortgages never charged prime to begin with - they charged nothing for an extended period of time, then when the reset date rolled around, they charged 3x prime. |
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| Originally posted by darcnight believe what you want as far as systemic racism goes. i've studied it thoroughly...have resources,etc...that deal SPECIFICALLY with housing issues and how it affects minorities and the poor...but thats something for another time. |
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| Originally posted by SniFFleS BTW how was the CFA exam? |
I approve of:
-his mandate to rule as given to him by the citizens of the USA
-his choice not to wear bullet proof vests, or appear behind bomb resistant glass [a la the pope-mobile], making him an easier target.
I disapprove of:
-his faith in the islamic religion.
-his race
-his message of hope and equality for all
Seriously people, the man isn't in power yet. How can you judge him when he hasn't had a chance to implement any policy yet? We all know the election, like all elections, is just a popularity contest, so there's no way to know how capable this guy is yet. All this "obama-mania" is a little overdone. Relax, he's not gonna fix the world.
Interesting piece in the globe today on the merits of a stimulus plan and how it works. I've spent most of my day reviewing the details from yesterday (work related stuff) and it's more energy focused than I expected. Everyone's talking about infrastructure, but it's mostly energy efficiency/independence and tax cuts.
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Sizing up economic stimulus What's the best way to stimulate? There's a new consensus that stimulus is needed, but the question is how. Kerry Stirton examines the debate From Friday's Globe and Mail January 16, 2009 at 7:24 AM EST Kerry Stirton, a New York-based investment manager formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a long-time student of macroeconomic trends and financial public policy. Each week he will examine a facet of the current economic situation, reviewing the best thinking on the topic, filtered by his own. Today, he begins by reviewing the matter of stimulus, central to the debate in Washington and Ottawa. Milton Friedman would not approve. The U.S. free-markets economist and Nobel recipient once famously said: "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." But he's no longer around to condemn the current enthusiasm for government stimulus, which suddenly enjoys a remarkably broad consensus. The current basic approach in Washington and in New York proceeds this way: "What's Plan A? Answer: Massive fiscal stimulus. What if it doesn't work; what's Plan B? Answer: More massive stimulus." The questions that economists and politicians are really grappling with right now are occurring at a different level of emphasis: How much stimulus is enough? How much of a multiplier on spending can we expect? Are direct spending programs more or less effective than tax cuts? At precisely what should the direct spending be targeted? When will we see the benefits? This is where the differences start to emerge, in both economic theory and in political practice. The Democrats - with Barack Obama and the director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, in the lead - tend to favour large-scale direct spending programs on projects they conceive as multiplier-rich public goods: hospital and school infrastructure, clean energy technology, highway and transmission line construction. These are areas where they think the private sector would not be stepping up, especially in this under-capacity economy. The main arguments are that direct spending can target long-term, strategically beneficial priorities, yet get three to four million people back to work quickly, according to the president-elect. The programs cannot be hijacked into savings accounts or stuck under mattresses as tax credits can be. Invoked as supportive authority for this approach are John Maynard Keynes and the reinvestment programs of the Thirties and the period around the Second World War spawned by Keynes's thinking. That said, the proposed program is a real political compromise that throws together a large tax cut of about $300-billion with nearly $500-billion in direct spending. Republican economists tend to agree that a sizable stimulus is needed, but prefer monetary tools and tax cuts. They think direct spending is misdirected and slow. They see such spending as inevitably wasteful because it comes in a pressured and artificial manner, and is not allocated by pricing mechanisms in the market; with lower multiplier effects than tax cuts. They prefer tax cuts, because in theory they could start going to work as soon as they are passed into law, as people should know they have more take-home income. But regardless of left-right balance, most economists will acknowledge that even if a spending program's multiplier effects are reasonably positive, the effect unavoidably lags. Promises of millions of created jobs in the very short term are probably not well grounded. As Anthony Karydakis, former chief U.S. economist for JP Morgan Asset Management, now teaching at Columbia University, states: "The potential of such a package to turn the economy around in any meaningful way in 2009 is actually quite limited. In fact, it is nearly impossible to alter the trajectory of economic activity over the next two to three quarters, fiscal stimulus or not. ... Over that time frame, the economy will simply do what it is already on track to do, which is essentially to experience additional contraction." So, more specific and nuanced arguments are now coming into the discussion, and presumably there will be more in the next few weeks. A group of 49 Nobel recipients has recently weighed in with their support for the Obama program, with their own twist. Citing the high state of readiness of thousands of already approved scientific research programs that are just waiting to find some money and hire staff, they contend that the "science multiplier" is higher than other multipliers and argue that well-paid jobs will arise, virtually immediately, in ways that will induce private capital to be invested in the eventual commercial applications, while the resulting discoveries improve the competitive advantage of the nation in all sorts of unseen ways. As two of them have written: "Money could be spent within weeks of passage of a stimulus to fund the many highly rated applications that have been waiting for support in 2008 and to restore dollars from funded grants in recent years." That a dollar spent on a new asphalt covering is worth the same as a dollar spent on scientific research does seem a stretch. Still, there are many views on multiplier coefficients out there. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw cites as authority on this issue a recent study by Valerie A. Ramey, an economist at the University of California. Looking at U.S. history, Prof. Ramey estimates that each dollar of government spending boosts GDP by only 1.4 dollars. You get 40 cents extra in private-sector spinoff activity for every dollar spent by government, whereas Prof. Ramey sees tax cuts having more than twice that kind of multiplier outcome over time. Others on the other side of the spectrum have this relative effectiveness assessment reversed. It turns out, however, that last year's Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, does not see the multiplier much differently, at 1.5 times. But the challenges of direct-spending efficacy have him arguing for even more aggressive use of the public purse. In his strongly worded opinion, and not without its basic logic: "Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30-trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it's able to sell. And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this "output gap" .... Even the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] says that 'economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 per cent below its potential.' This translates into $2.1-trillion of lost production. ... to close a gap of more than $2-trillion - possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic. ... The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job." Against this backdrop, the methods and the magnitudes of the stimulus are the key issues, and have become more controversial with each passing day. Lobbyists for often-conflicting special interests have been marching hard through Congress this week. And with the TARP bailout a fresh sore spot, temperatures are rising again. Congress balked last fall in the first vote for the financial rescue. It seems increasingly conceivable that a snag might occur to forestall quick passage of Mr. Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. |
i was in the globe yesterday for the CFP.
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| Originally posted by SniFFleS i was in the globe yesterday for the CFP. |
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| Originally posted by Spam "Clinton Democrats are to blame for the credit crunch Dennis Sewell Wednesday, 1st October 2008 Our current financial turmoil is not the fault of greedy bankers, says Dennis Sewell. In fact, the banks were bullied into lowering their lending standards by left-wing idealists intent on equal opportunities at any cost �Let us be clear: this is a crisis caused on Wall Street,� insisted Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her consensus-strangling speech on Monday, shortly before her fellow members of the House of Representatives voted to reject the President�s $700 billion bail-out plan. Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama ventured that the root cause of the trouble in the markets was that �too many people in Washington and Wall Street weren�t minding the store�. Pinning the blame for the crisis on greedy bankers and incompetent regulators may have seemed plausible enough during the turmoil of the past few days. Writing in The Spectator last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury noted how �we find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims�. Not this week, we didn�t. We talked about the markets as if they were thoroughly unreasonable, out of control, perhaps even raving mad. Following Monday�s rejection of the bail-out plan, stock markets, impatient with Congress�s delay in tying up a deal, threw a massive hissy fit, which wiped billions off the value of shares. The next day, they made a partial bounce back, based presumably upon a belated recognition that talks to thrash out another bail-out plan were already in progress. Meanwhile, the sullen banks remained obdurate in their reluctance to lend to one another, let alone anyone else, despite a massive injection of liquidity from central bankers around the world. Not much there to inspire confidence in the system. Consequently, this hardly seems the most appropriate moment to mount a defence of capitalism in general, and American bankers in particular, against the threats posed by meddlesome politicians and excessive regulation. But, what the heck. Unless we take advantage of this hiatus between the crashing of financial institutions to take an honest look at the origins of our current predicament, then today�s spin and myth-making will quickly harden into tomorrow�s firm conviction. Let us be clear: this crisis was not caused on Wall Street � it was caused in the White House. The root problem was not financial � it was political, and those truly responsible for this fiasco were not bankers, nor even Bush Republicans; they were Clinton Democrats. For generations, America�s bankers have been firmly refusing credit to those they judged unworthy of it. Yet the mountain of toxic subprime debt that has threatened to overwhelm the entire financial system, and the astonishing number of mortgage foreclosures across the United States, is proof that, at some point in the relatively recent past, bankers radically altered their behaviour and began to shower mortgages on borrowers who had no realistic prospect of keeping up their repayments. What could possibly have induced them to act so recklessly, and so out of character? The facile answer to that question is greed, the lure of a fast and easy buck. The correct answer is that banks were bullied, cajoled and coerced into lowering their lending standards by politicians in pursuit of an ideological agenda. Let�s wind back to 1993 and Roberta Achtenberg�s arrival on the Washington political scene. Achtenberg had made her name in San Francisco as a civil rights lawyer and activist, campaigning to keep open the city�s gay bathhouses, and (I promise I�m not making this up) pressing for an increase in the number of gay Scoutmasters. Bill Clinton offered her a job in his new administration, and Roberta Achtenberg became the first openly lesbian nominee ever to receive a Senate confirmation. She duly took up her post as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics. White House aides, in familiar West Wing style, could parrot the many social advantages that would accrue: high levels of home ownership correlated with less violent crime, better school performance, a heightened sense of commun-ity. But standing in the way of the realisation of this dream were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient and old-fashioned things as cash deposits and regular repayments � things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative. Meanwhile, Ms Achtenberg, a member of the kickass school of public administration, was busy setting up a network of enforcement offices across the country, manned by attorneys and investigators, and primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practising unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability. Achtenberg believed racism was a big factor in keeping minorities from enjoying the same level of home ownership as whites. She doubted if much could be done to change people�s attitudes on racial matters, but she was confident she, in cahoots with Attorney General Janet Reno, could use the law to change the behaviour of banks. However, when little or no overt or deliberate racial discrimination was discovered among the mortgage lenders, HUD�s investigators turned to trying to prove �disparate treatment� of minority groups, a notion similar to that of unintentional �institutional racism�. If a bank refused loans to proportionally more black applicants than white ones, for instance, the onus would fall on it to prove it had good grounds for doing so or face settlement penalties running into millions of dollars. A series of highly publicised cases were brought on this basis, starting in 1994. Eventually the investigators would turn somewhat desperately to �disparate impact�, a form of discrimination so abstract and rarefied as to be imperceptible to its supposed victims, and indeed often only discernible at all through the application of multivariate regression analysis to information stored on regulators� databases. In fact, by 1995 Achtenberg was actually having to rein in her zealots, issuing a clarification that the use of the phrase �master bedroom� in a property advertisement was, despite its clear patriarchal and slave-owning resonances, not actually an actionable offence under the anti-discrimination laws. These mortgage banks, which have been responsible for issuing about three quarters of the dodgy subprime loans that are proving troublesome today, quickly took the hint. From the mid-1990s they began to abandon their formerly rigorous lending criteria. Mortgages were offered with only 3 per cent deposit requirements, and eventually with no deposit requirement at all. The mortgage banks fell over one another to provide loans to low-income households and especially to minority customers. In the five years from 1994 to 1999, the number of African-American and Latino homeowners increased by two million. The national banks, responsible for the remaining quarter of the current subprime loans, were put under a different kind of pressure by the Clinton team to boost their low-income and minority lending too. Changes were made to the Community Reinvestment Act to establish a system by which banks were rated according to how much lending they did in low-income neighbourhoods. A good CRA rating was necessary if a bank wanted to get regulators to sign off on mergers, expansions, even new branch openings. A poor rating could be disastrous for a bank�s business plan. It was a different kind of coercion, but just as effective. At the same time, the government pressed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two giants of the secondary mortgage market, to help expand mortgage loans among low and moderate earners, and introduced new rules allowing the organisations to get involved in the securitisation of subprime loans. The first package was launched in 1997 in collaboration with Bear Stearns. So, by the end of the 20th century most of the ingredients that would combine to cause today�s subprime crisis were already in place. Nevertheless, the 1990s can seem a long time ago, and to grasp the connection between the situation then and what is happening now, it�s important to realise that only a small proportion of the subprime loans made since George W. Bush became President have gone to new, first-time buyers. A huge number of them have been refinancing loans, replacing mortgages originally taken out perhaps eight, ten or 12 years ago. Imagine yourself in the place of one of those low-income householders who acquired a property in the late 1990s as a result of the Clinton home-ownership drive. What happened next? Chances are you managed OK for a while, but after a few years found that like most poor Americans, your income wasn�t going up, it was declining. Around 2003, with your credit cards maxed out, you desperately needed to release some equity from your home. Luckily there was equity there to release, so you refinanced for the first time and enjoyed having some real money for a change. A couple of years later a pushy mortgage broker called to suggest you do it all again, squeezing out the last drops of equity and opting for a low-start mortgage. So you did � and that was fine while it lasted, but the interest rate just sky-rocketed. You will never pay off that loan, it is pure poison to you, just like it�s pure poison to the investment bank that ended up with it on its books. You will just walk away. It�s not your fault. It�s not the bank�s fault. And it certainly isn�t George W. Bush�s fault � every attempt he has made to reform the mortgage market has been blocked by Congressional Democrats. So that�s how we get from there to here, from crude attempts at social engineering during the early, heady days of the first Clinton administration to the turmoil on Wall Street today. There may be many technical lessons to be learned about selling and buying mortgages, about the best ways to price and manage risk, and about the regulation of financial markets, but I believe the most important lesson of all is an ethical one: it�s about not behaving ruthlessly when trying to change the world for the better. Bill Clinton�s team, like so many progressives here in Britain, were not content to wait and see what fruits equal opportunities might bring. They felt compelled to secure their equal outcomes by any means necessary, even if that meant debauching institutions, corrupting professions and trying to skew the operation of markets. That only ever leads to chaos." |
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