March 14th 2009
As If We Need One More Smoking Gun
M
aybe those who get their news from TMZ and E! will believe Obama’s rising, repeated rhetoric about how he inherited the economic mess from Bush, but everyone else knows Jimmy Carter planted the ticking time bomb and Bill Clinton packed economic C-4 all around it.
Infidels are Cool just tweeted this link – http://twitpic.com/23h1a - to a 1999 NYT article that lays it out quite grandly. Included:
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 phenominal growth in profits. …
“Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990s by reducing downpayment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.” …
In moving, even tentatively into this new [subprime] area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.
Given how clearly this sets the blame and how prescient it was, I wonder if the NYT editorial board would consider re-running the article in its entirety. … Nah.
Art: Savannah Red
Posted in Economic Policy, NYT | 1 Comment » | |
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March 14th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
A better caption might be: “Darling, let’s have lots of children so we can pass our debts on to them!”