I think Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan and Harry Lamb wrote a couple of good articles that might tell you a few things about the root cause of the day of reckoning that is upon America and how it will also bring the next day of reckoning due to our massive deficit spending. I am not saying there were not other factors. This day would have come anyway due to the greed of many and the socialism of others but what Coulter, Buchanan and Lamb write about is a good part of the reason why this economic shock is now playing out before your very eyes.
They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority, by Ann Coulter
Here are a few points in the article by Ann Coulter:
Under Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001.
Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named “Caylee.”
Threatening lawsuits, Clinton’s Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn’t a joke — it’s a fact.
In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action lending policies as one of the “hidden success stories” of the Clinton administration, saying that “black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded.”
Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses.
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.
So it was not all about greedy lenders it is about Democratic Party socialist liberals pushing affirmative action lending plans and regulations that forced the lenders to make them lend to the unqualified.
Day of Reckoning, by Pat Buchanan
Here is a bit of what Pat Buchanan has to say on this issue and some of it is the same except Pat blames the liberal in both parties:
Had there not been a steady and constant infusion of easy money and credit into the U.S. economy by the Fed, for years on end, a housing bubble of the magnitude of the one that has just exploded could never have been created.
Had the politicians of both parties not coerced and pressured banks, S&Ls, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make all those sub-prime mortgages, then to tie this rotten paper to good paper, convert it into securities and sell to banks all over the world, there would have been no global financial crisis.
Had they seen this coming and acted sooner, the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury would not today, like Henny Penny, be crying, “The sky is falling!” and the end times are at hand, unless we give them 5 percent of our gross domestic product to buy up suspect securities backed by sub-prime mortgages.
Looking at all the money being ladled out by the U.S. government to prevent a collapse, and the diminished revenue coming in, it is hard to see how America avoids future deficits that reach $1 trillion a year. These will imperil both the dollar itself and the ability of the United States, which saves nothing, to borrow from the rest of the world. The downsizing of America is at hand.
Yes, indeed, we have arrived at the Day of Reckoning for Uncle Sam.
Soviet-Style collapse in America’s future article by Harry Lamb
The meltdown in the financial markets has caused the finger of blame to spin like a weathervane in a hurricane. The underlying cause of the debacle, however, has been largely ignored. Driven by “progressive” Democrats and Republicans, the cause is the relentless shift from a free market economy to a socialist economy.
The piper must be paid. The question is whether to do it now – and let the chips fall where they may, or, to kick the can down the road and pay the piper later. The answer, of course, is to kick the can into the next generation, with another leap toward socialism. The bailout plan – whatever the particulars – is nothing short of a government takeover of the financial industry. The next president will have to sort it out and build the road toward future recovery or final disaster.
Barack Obama’s incessant drumbeat about the failure of the economic policies of the last eight years is either gross ignorance or, more likely, political blame shifting. The cause of the current meltdown is clearly the Democrat’s insistence upon giving federally guaranteed mortgages to people who could not afford them. Even now, Democrats insist, not on the minimum government involvement possible, but on adding all sorts of give-away ornaments on the bailout Christmas tree. Obama is also promising to take over the energy industry, the health industry, and to give tax credits and even refunds to some people with money he shamelessly takes from others. This is redistribution of wealth – pure socialism.
McCain may be only marginally better, but any deterrent to the Democrats’ determined transformation of America to unabashed socialism should be welcomed. Despite the U.N.’s declaration to the contrary, no person has a “right” to housing. If Democrats prevail and continue their pursuit of the U.N’.s goal of universal socialism, America can expect to experience the same total collapse experienced by the Soviet Union.
I said in a prior post that future budget deficits were going to go way up and It matters not who becomes President, the deficits will happen as sure as night follows day and if foreigners ever stop buying our debt this present crises will be nothing compared to the time when we can no longer sell our debt to the world. In the future we will have to do the bidding of the lenders (China & Oil rich nations) or face complete economic collapse.