Hope ‘n Change is a leftist who’s totally incompetent at just about everything except political scheming and his own personality cult. His latest brainstorm – Barney Frank’s, actually - is to ‘fix’ our financial system, primarily by awarding the Federal Reserve unprecedented powers to meddle in markets. In their world, our current crisis is all the fault of those nasty Wall Street bankers and traders – not politicians and lobbyists who gamed the financial system to reward their cronies and constituents, or the Federal Reserve that created the housing bubble in the first place.
And it’s a sign of the times that one of the collapse’s principal architects – Barney Frank – is now going to ‘fix’ it with new legislation that simply doubles down on his own unique contribution to the crisis: ‘affordable housing’. From Hans Bader at the Examiner:
The President has just announced proposals for a major overhaul of the financial system. The proposals would force banks to make even MORE risky loans to low-income people. Even liberal newspapers like the Village Voice have admitted that “affordable housing” mandates are a key reason for the housing crisis and the massive number of defaulting borrowers. But Obama will not accept this reality. Instead, he wants to create a new “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” to rigorously enforce regulations pressuring banks to make loans to low-income borrowers, such as the Community Reinvestment Act. (Obama once represented ACORN, which pressures banks to make risky loans).
In explaining why there is supposedly a need for this new agency, when other agencies already enforce the Community Reinvestment Act and fair-lending laws, his regulatory blueprint complains that “State and federal bank supervisory agencies’ primary mission is to ensure that financial institutions act prudently, a mission that, in appearance if not always in practice, often conflicts with their consumer protection responsibilities.” (Pg. 54).
In other words, the power to force banks to make low-income loans should be given to an agency that has no duty to ensure prudent lending or to take into account the effects of such requirements on banks’ stability or viability.
Read it all. It’s a good, critical piece of writing that assaults both Frank and Hope ‘n Change. And lest anyone forget how the world financial markets were infected with toxic mortgage-backed securities, here’s the viral video from last fall’s campaign that explains the mess and some of the key actors:
So it was the Community Reinvestment Act and all those trillions in liar loans that collapsed world’s financial markets. And Barney Frank and Hope ‘n Change want to continue the insanity.
They’re just ‘returning the country’s wealth to its rightful owners’.
Hat Tip to Doug Ross for the Bader/Examiner piece.
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