Krugman: Michael Bloomberg, Ignoramus

[ProSense]

Michael Bloomberg, Ignoramus

...the favored candidate of those who believe we need a smart centrist to solve our nation’s problems reveals himself to be completely ignorant about the causes of our economic crisis, someone who just swallows right-wing propaganda whole:

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.

“But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.

You can read lots about how wrong this is; Mike Konczal has done it at great length, for example here. The fact is that for any public figure to go with the Congress-did-it argument at this stage is for him to reveal both that he is grossly ignorant about the central policy issue of the day and that he gets his “analysis” from right-wing flacks.

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[mmonk]

1. Love the title.

[tblue37]

2. Ignorant? Not likely. He knows better, but he is complicit in the propaganda and cover-up of

the real crimes.

[applegrove]

3. The meme in banking circles is that it was freddie mac and frannie may that were

responsible for it all. I've heard that before.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Yeah, right, Congress forced the financial institutions to devise

interest-only mortgages, credit default swaps, derivatives...NOT.

[JoePhilly]

5. Some one should introduce him to the Gramm-Leech-Bliley Act.

Gramm wrote the legislation that allowed financial institutions to take on enormous risks and then re-bundle all manner of bad loans and pass the risk along. EVERY financial institution caught on to this and THEY ALL DID IT, thus poisoning the entire system.

Gramm, for his part, left congress and went straight to the board of directors at UBS, where he was paid MILLIONS for his services.