Sweet! Sadly, I think you are right. I need a better job. LOL nm
Posted By: Bystander on 2008-11-06
In Reply to: My husband and I were discussing is that the upside of Obama as pres it that we will probably - qualify for foodstamps now.
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this is a really sweet one too
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wow--that was sweet!
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sweet neocons
Love the Rolling Stones, always have, but I think the name of the song should have been..Lying sack of dirt, warmonger, murdering, chickenhawk neocons..but I guess since the Rolling Stones are a commercial band and have contracts with the NFL, they had to keep their song a bit low key..
No more venemous than you, sweet pea.
Aren't you sweet.
Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?
Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it isn't true.
Robert Gordon | April 7, 2008 | web only
The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.
The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."
Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."
This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.
The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)
The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.
But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.
Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.
Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."
Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."
It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.
And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.
Im back, sweet peas
To those who have posted..where is gt?? I have been relaxing in Mexico..NOT BANNED..as Im sure many have wished or prayed..nope..IM HERE..Just took a few days off to enjoy my Mexican friends and shop at their so inexpensive shops..IM BACK.
I would be calm sweet and caring too
if I had her money. Her outfit the other night was said to be worth over $300K. Minus the 3-carat diamond earrings, the outfit was only valued at around $30K. Laura Bush's outfit was estimated to be valued at less than $5K. Michelle Obama's was probably in that ballpark too.
Even if this stuff was donated by the designers, etc., I can't relate to any of these people. You will find me cruising the aisles of my local thrift shop looking for a bargain
sweet - more like sour and rotten LOL LOL LOL
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His sweet little Kenyan grandmother was there....
and she said herself that she is so proud to have witnessed the birth IN KENYA of her grandson who will be the next POTUS. Can't deny that one.
Success is sweet.. jealousy is ugly
he won! hahaha
Oh it's so sweet you're concerned, you do have a heart!...nm
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Sadly, no.
xxx
Sadly....
to some Americans, we will never be "color blind" and the race card will still fly frequently by some people.
Also, it is sad that even though some of us see that Obama is inexperienced and how that has hurt us, etc......there are many that still love the fool. I guess it will take, God forbid, another terrorist attack on US soil or our economy to totally collapse before people get a clue. Although I'm sure they will still give Obama the thumbs up because....hey.....this is ALL Bush's fault....remember? Can someone please pass the kool-aid around?
The Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly page sm
is a great idea. O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, and Malkin are at the top of my list for rabid vermin. There are some other great links there too, some funny.
Sadly, the first thing...
I thought when I heard **foiled terror plot** was Wag the Dog. I do not believe that this is a hoax in any way, but it is certainly distressing when the first entity you suspect in any cover up or any **make up stuff** is your own government. The timing was what made me think that. With W's popularity in the toilet, over half of Americans wanting out of the war and Lamont winning in Connecticut, without something to distract us, the Lamont win and what it means could have taken over the news for some time to come. Can't have that. Now we are not thinking about Iraq, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel or changing the face of our House and Senate in November. We are all focused on the terrorists again. Same thing with BP. Very much like Enron, all of a sudden they have to close down the oil pipe and CA gets hit the hardest. BP makes tons of money, we all begin to think drilling anywhere is okay. The administration is happy. The oil companies are happy. I did hear that BP is going to try to keep the pipe open now while they do repairs. There was SOOOOO much criticism about the timing and the fact that they have known for years that the pipe is corroded that they have been forced to do something different. Anyway, I believe that the deal at Heathrow was the real thing, not a ploy in any way. I trust the British and Scotland yard much more than I do this administration and the CIA/FBI. It is just disturbing that it has come to this. I take everything I hear with a grain of salt until it is proven to me to be true. I used to trust my government but I fear them now. I just hope we are all still here in November 2008.
Sadly this is so true
Like I said, this is a high school class president campaign, not a USA presidential campaign. What he promises he cannot deliver.
Are there any adjectives besides sad and sadly? n/m
Sadly, some of the senators, if not all,
think we DO want this. Doesn't matter how many calls they get. They think we just love mortgaging ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
There are a few that are fighting against the bill as it stands but....and I know a certain person will blast me for this but Schumer, Dodd, and Kerry absolutely screamed today that this package is what HAS to pass. Schumer stated right out that it's what the people want. Kerry stated there was no reason to cut anything from it. Dodd stated that the TARP package has money in it to help with the mortgage debaucle so why they want amendments to the tune of $9B in this one was beyond him.
So, if there is money in TARP for the homeowners, why aren't the homeowners being helped? No rocket science in that. The banks and Wall Street are keeping it.
They just don't get it.
Sadly, most don't have a clue and
don't really care what got us in this mess. Banks and mortgage companies were forced to give subprime loans because the democrats wanted EVERYBODY to have house, whether they could afford it or not, giving everyone the belief they were somehow entitled to a home, money or no money. The law was pushed by the democratic party (for those who bother to read it) and it became law that the banks HAD to make these loans AND the law put in place these institutions making money on these worthless pieces of paper. They were forced to do the business with those who had no business in there in the first place getting a loan. And for those who knew they were living beyond their means and even lying about the income, they should have to bear the burden of their stupidity. I do not feel the least bit responsible for keeping them in their home. We live well below what a bank told us we could afford and we have......better safe than sorry!
For all those that think free handouts somehow will make a better country for us and hitting companies that employ with MORE taxes and treating those who are fortunate enough to be rich as if rich is a bad word and going after their income, do those same people EVER stop to ask themselves who the heck pays their assistance!!! It's those who have more money.....duh!! If you didn't have them, you wouldn't have your free money in the first place but lets certainly not discuss that, Heaven forbid!
I'm glad you see the writing on the wall but I'm afraid for those who voted for Obama who are now changing their tune are realizing all too late they have been screwed.
Sadly the blame game is what we
get to hear the most instead of actual plans and solutions to this that won't end up screwing us in the end.
I've learned more about the economy than I ever have in the past couple of days. Makes me wish I'd have listened in economics in high school. Hind sight is 20/20. LOL!
Have a great day! 
Sadly enough there are those that live in the same make
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I sadly enough agree with you Gourdpainter
I think the ugliness has barely begun. Truth will out in the end, it always does.
Sadly, this is reality in my state, also......nm
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Exactly! Sadly, Americans cant seem to wake up.
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You're right. Sadly enough you've wasted your
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It is disgusting, huh? Sadly, I have lost faith
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Sadly, there are plenty of wimpy miserable little
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I think sadly you are right, I always thought that if I would vote Republican, it would be for McCai
and believe he really wants to do good for this country; my own thought was that he was advised, after seeing all the disillusioned Hillary supporters who were not completely sold on Barack yet, that he should pick a female running mate, scoop up all the disappointed Hillary supporters who would want a female in the White House, and it all blew up, Ms. Palin was just not an intelligent choice as running mate, she brought him down, and I think it all snowballed so quickly that all Mr. McCain could do was watch as the snowball hit bottom and disintegrated. But I believe he is a very good Senator.
Sadly, common sense and good behavior...........sm
are seldom rewarded but highly expected and those who practice sound financial habits are often not given the breaks that those who do not are given. It just seems harsh to say "screw them" when one may not know the circumstances and when there may be children involved who would be homeless through no fault of their own. Guess I'm just a little tender-hearted about that.
Sadly, the haters started to hate him way before he even took office....sm
I have mixed views here, but I found it amazing, as I read this board around election time, and then shortly thereafter, that all the Bushwackers and Right Wingers were already condemning and DOOMING the Obama administration....way before the man even took the oath of office! Now George had 8+ years to do good for this country, to help the economy, the reach out to the poor, to upgrade the educational system, and what did his administration do? Let's see, instead of getting Bin Ladin, we spend billions and billions, and thousands of precious lives, on a war with Iraq for those infamous invisible WMDs which no one could find, and which was reported to the President ahead of time. We have made most of the world hate us for our arrogance and stupidity. He let Wall Street run amok and watched the country go down in ashes....stop bashing Obama, no he is not God, he is not perfect, he has faults, he will make mistakes inevitably (and I am not fond of several things in the stimulus bill), but by God give him a chance, he has barely been in office a MONTH versus 8 excruciating, embarrassing years with the Bush gang, support him as our American President, and stop DOOMING his administration before he even gets a chance. Sorry, off my worn-out soap box now!
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