Obama's Role in the Economy Mess

Cerise

Well-Known Member
When Obama worked for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) he filed suit against Citibank citing CRA violations -- the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed in 1977 meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities, living in unstable neighborhoods.

Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitizing of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ibd/20080917/bs_ibd_ibd/20080917issues01


"Subprime lending started off as a good idea - helping Americans buy homes who couldn't previously afford to. Financial institutions created new financial instruments that could securitize these loans, slice them into finer and finer risk categories and spread them out among investors around the country and around the world." -- Barack Obama, NY Speech, September 17, 2007


The CRA opened the door for groups like ACORN to abuse the law with legal threats of racisim, forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to high-risk poor and minority customers.


"I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work." -- Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007


Now we know what a "community organizer" does.

In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago's ACORN to run training sessions in "direct action." That's the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called "Ninja" loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn't afford them. http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307667123149723

Burning Down the House/Listen to the Money Talk

House of Lies

Taxpayers are now being forced to pay for the situation that Obama helped to create.
 
What a nice bunch of Op-Eds you found. *yawn*

Taxpayers are being forced to pay for the situation Bush and his War created.

Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US'


Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent | February 28, 2008

THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.

Australia also faced a real bill much greater than the $2.2billion in military spending reported last week by Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, Professor Stiglitz said, pointing to higher oil prices and other indirect costs of the wars.

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

Professor Stiglitz, an academic at the Columbia Business School and a former economic adviser to president Bill Clinton, said a further $US500 billion was going to be spent on the fighting in the next two years and that could have been used more effectively to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world.

The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world, he said.

Just a few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said.

The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.

"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

"(Then defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion.

"Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that."

Five years after the war, the US was still spending about $US50billion every three months on direct military costs, he said.

Professor Stiglitz and another Clinton administration economist, Linda Bilmes, have produced a book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, pulling together their research on the true cost of the war, which does not include the cost to Iraq.

One of the greatest discrepancies is that the official figures do not include the long-term healthcare and social benefits for injured servicemen, who are surviving previously fatal attacks because of improved body armour.

"The ratio of injuries to fatalities in a normal war is 2:1. In this war they admitted to 7:1 but a true number is (something) like 15:1."

Some 100,000 servicemen have been diagnosed with serious psychological problems and the soldiers doing the most tours of duty have not yet returned.

Professor Stiglitz attributed to the Iraq war $US5-$US10 of the almost $US80-a-barrel increase in oil prices since the start of the war, adding that it would have been reasonable to attribute more than $US35 of that rise to the war.

He said the British bill for its role in the war was about 20 times the pound stg. 1billion ($2.1 billion) that former prime minister Tony Blair estimated before the war.

The British Government was yesterday ordered to release details of its planning for the war, when the country's Information Commissioner backed a Freedom of Information request for the minutes of two cabinet meetings in the days before the war.

Commissioner Richard Thomas said that because of the importance of the decision to go to war, the public interest in disclosing the minutes outweighed the public interest in withholding the information.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23286149-2703,00.html

I can find some other stories blaming other people too if you like. But I think the bottom line is this happened in the last year of an 8 year presidency. Most of it with a republican majority that would do anything Bush wanted without question.
 
One year ago, we were at the Dows high. Hardly fodder for Iraq causing this.
 
who was in charge when the shit hit the fan?

who was in charge when all the laws the led up to this where made?

now you blame the guy RUNNING to be the guy in charge.
 
who was in charge when the shit hit the fan?

who was in charge when all the laws the led up to this where made?

now you blame the guy RUNNING to be the guy in charge.

Clinton 1994 according to the graph.
He opened it up for the people that shouldn't have gotten one.
He Created the bubble. It just didn't pop, until illegal immigration was tightened up by the states.

Then all the other pile-ons kicked in full force.
Bad admin, nature, greed, and bad policing...
 
In other words, look for who started the straw pile, not the one who allowed the final straw to be laid.
 
Jimmah originally signed the CRA into law. Through the years it has required banks to make unsafe loans with no money down to people based on their race or income level, although they had not the way nor the means to pay it back.


It was tweaked in the 1990's, at the same time ACORN and Obama came onto the scene. Who was in charge "when all the laws that led up to this were made?" Hmmmm.


QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Under that leadership special interest groups influenced lending decisions that favored unqualified borrowers.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...erence/Times Topics/Subjects/M/Minorities (US)

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.


''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer.


In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers.


Bush proposed an overhaul but the dems rejected it.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''


McCain co-sponsored the FEDERAL HOUSING ENTERPRISE REGULATORY REFORM ACT OF 2005


But the dems, Barack Obama included, killed this reform in Committee preventing a full Senate Vote.

Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008


1. Dodd, Christopher J S D-CT $133,900

2. Kerry, John S D-MA $111,000

3. Obama, Barack S D-IL $105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary S D-NY $75,550

5. Kanjorski, Paul E H D-PA $65,500


So it only took 9 years for the seeds of greed and political correctness to bankrupt the country. Planted by Carter, germinated by Clinton, propagated by Obama.
 
Clinton 1994 according to the graph.
He opened it up for the people that shouldn't have gotten one.
He Created the bubble. It just didn't pop, until illegal immigration was tightened up by the states.

Then all the other pile-ons kicked in full force.
Bad admin, nature, greed, and bad policing...

recap
 
Oh you're right, we should probably rely on your random videos at youtube and JibJab to get to the bottom of things :laugh:
 
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