How bad is the economic crisis? Conservatives are trying to pin the blame on Dems

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Sat Sep-20-08 10:04 PM
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How bad is the economic crisis? Conservatives are trying to pin the blame on Dems

Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?

Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it isn't true.

Robert Gordon | April 7, 2008 | web only

The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.

The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."

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This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.

The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)

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THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM; Kerry Sees Credit Card Abuses, And Promises Steps to End Them

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: August 27, 2004

Senator John Kerry added a plank to his platform yesterday, promising to push for legislation that would curb what his campaign describes as abusive practices in credit card and mortgage lending.

The proposals coincided with the announcement of new Census Bureau data showing that family and household income, adjusted for inflation, had fallen over the first three years of the Bush administration. The decline came as consumer debt rose, and the new plank promised relief for wage earners in straitened circumstances.

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A Kerry administration ''would ask Congress to legislate standards and to direct the Federal Trade Commission and bank regulators to impose regulations consistent with those standards,'' Mr. Sperling said. Much of this would be achieved through amendments to the Truth in Lending Act, he and Mr. Gordon said.

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Mr. Kerry's principal mortgage proposal would prohibit lenders from using balloon mortgages in most subprime loans, which often go to low-income people at higher rates.

Economists: Gramm To Blame For The Current Crisis

Read about: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act