Mike Bloomberg is a pretty rich man. He made his money delivering financial information to people in power. Needless to say, he doesn’t have that personal touch when it comes to talking about the concerns of the poor. In fact, he’s decided to get the story of the mortgage meltdown completely wrong to implicate Congress rather than his Wall Street buddies.
Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
“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 gave 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. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.”
This is the typical alibi, along the lines of “The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial crisis by forcing irresponsible lending after laying dormant for 25 years,” that Republicans like to use as a convenient front for Wall Street. Nobody should claim that Fannie and Freddie were squeaky-clean enterprises. But it’s clear they had absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble, getting into subprime only years after the private banks started gorging themselves. It’s really just crazy talk, and I think the best refutation comes from Jeff Madrick.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/11/01/bloomberg-blame-congress-for-the-housing-bubble/See also Peter Wallison Discusses Fannie and Freddie for the American Spectator, or: Where are the Fact Checkers? -
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/peter-wallison-discusses-fannie-and-freddie-for-the-american-spectator-or-where-are-the-fact-checkers/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(892 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
