Who's Fault?

[Ren]

How Credit Default Swaps Became a Timebomb

read something new and learn instead of running around blaming the other party like you are getting paid to do it.

Not saying it was the only reason, but Credit Default Swaps (CDS) had a big part to play in the current mess we are in.

[Lorisco]

[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
AynRandLuvr wrote:
Under the guise of helping the poor, you libs created a system that simply destroys everyone. Good job!

You fulfilled Abe Lincoln’s prediction that we would be brought down by our ‘vandals from within’. You libs created that, you dumb fucks.

Yeah, spending and debt, to help the aged, the poor, the minorities. Look where it got you, country-killing bastards! Now go suck OBama’s dick in your favorite Larry Sinclair imitation.
You’re an idiot.

And nothing’s wrong with some programs to help people HERE in the UNITED STATES. Smaller countries with less resources pull it off with ease.[/quote]

The only thing wrong with them is that you can’t change people. You can’t make people responsible to pay back home loans by making loans easy to get. Socialism doesn’t work and is a failure. The current financial crisis demonstrates that. When you try and raise people up through handouts or artificially lowering standards, they do NOT raise to the occasion, they just bring all those who are making a living and being responsible down.

So now we all (those who are responsible) have to once again bail out those who aren’t to the tune of 700 billion!

We should send all these loan default idiots to live with Lixy.

[dhickey]

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Bush can share the blame for financial crisis

By Mark Landler and Sheryl Gay Stolberg Published: September 20, 2008

WASHINGTON: For his entire presidency, George W. Bush has tried to avoid the fate of his father: brought low by a feeble economy. Now, as the financial crisis radiates far beyond Wall Street, Bush faces an even grimmer prospect: being blamed, at least in part, for an economic breakdown.

“There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem,” Bush said Friday in a televised address from the White House Rose Garden. “Now is the time to solve it.”

But in Washington and on Wall Street, the debate has already begun. And while economists and other experts say there are plenty of culprits: Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the Federal Reserve, an overzealous home-lending industry, banks, and also Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton - they do agree that the Bush administration bears part of the blame.

These experts, from both political parties, say Bush’s early personnel choices and overarching antipathy toward regulation created a climate that, if it did not trigger the turmoil, almost certainly aggravated it.

The president’s first two Treasury secretaries, for instance, lacked the kind of Wall Street expertise that might have helped them raise red flags about the use of complex financial instruments at the heart of the crisis.

To his credit, Bush accurately foresaw the danger posed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and began calling as early as 2002 for greater regulation of the mortgage giants. But experts say the administration could have done even more to curb excesses in the housing market, and much more to police Wall Street, which transmitted those problems around the world.

In retrospect, “it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely,” said Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning research organization here. Reinhardt said it would also have helped “for Congress to have held hearings.”
[/quote]

It’s not the feds job to regulate the mortgage industry. He pressed the people that were in charge of this and they pushed back. Who is more to blame, they guy that didn’t push hard enough for reform or those that completely blocked his efforts. more detail below

Instead, voices inside the administration who favored tougher policing of Wall Street found themselves with few supporters. William Donaldson,

a former Wall Street executive with respected Republican credentials who became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Bush, quit in 2005 after facing resistance from the White House and Republican members of the panel, who criticized his support for stiffer regulations on mutual funds and hedge funds.

what does this have to do with the mortgage crisis?

Today, even those sympathetic to Bush say he cannot disentangle himself from a home-lending industry run amok or a banking industry that mortgaged its future on toxic loans.

“The crisis definitely happened on their watch,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University who advises the Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “This is eight years into the Bush administration. There was a lot of time to deal with it.”

To some extent, Bush was simply following a deregulatory pattern set by Clinton. Perhaps the most significant recent deregulation of the banking industry - the landmark act that allowed commercial banks to expand into other financial activities, like investment banking and insurance - was signed into law by Clinton in 1999.

Bush also inherited a culture of borrowing and a frothy housing market that has become “deeply embedded in the American psyche,” Rogoff said. And Reinhardt said the markets seemed to be doing so well that few analysts, either in government or the private sector, had a critical eye.

“When everybody is doing better,” Rogoff said, “it is difficult to see the underlying weaknesses.”

Still, the White House, in the view of critics, fostered a free-market hothouse in which these excesses were able to flower. It avoided regulation of banks and mortgage brokers, leaving much of that work to the Federal Reserve, which, under Alan Greenspan, showed little appetite for regulation.

By the time Bush’s current Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., proposed an overhaul of regulations governing the financial sector in April, the storm was already brewing.

The administration did push hard on Capitol Hill to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, only to find itself stymied by Congress.

But the administration’s intense focus on fending off what it foresaw as a looming housing crisis did not extend to the proliferation of fiendishly complex mortgage-backed securities, said Harvey Rosen, an economist who served on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, briefly as its chairman.

“Maybe there should have been,” Rosen said, “but we were focused more on the fact that if these entities just held plain-vanilla mortgage-backed securities, it was still a disaster in the making.”

Beyond its deregulatory bent, some economists argue that the administration’s fiscal and tax policies made the United States more dependent on foreign capital, which fueled the bubble in housing prices.

“A different Treasury would have taken a different approach,” said Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. “I don’t think the economy has been well-managed, and that has certainly been crucial for the problems we’re facing.”

The White House and Congress wanted to make housing affordable to more Americans, and freeing up the lending markets was a way to do that. As Rogoff said, “It was a market-based way to help poor people. There was an incredible belief in free markets.”

For all that faith, Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul O’Neill and John Snow, came from top jobs in industry, not Wall Street. They were viewed in Washington as advocating the interests of business, and being less comfortable with the mysteries of the markets.

Neither was seen as having much influence with the White House, and the Treasury lost some of the primacy in economic policy it had enjoyed under Summers and his predecessor, Robert Rubin. O’Neill and Snow declined to be interviewed for this article.

“The primary agency responsible for keeping an eye on these things is, and should be, the Treasury Department, and I think the president erred in the first place by appointing two secretaries who had no background in finance,”

said Bruce Bartlett, a Republican economist who was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and an official in the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush.

“If we had had a Treasury that was fully supported by the White House,” Bartlett said, “and a Treasury secretary such as Hank Paulson who was really attuned to what was going on in the financial markets, maybe some of these things could have been perceived in advance.”

The White House did name people well-versed in the markets to other posts, not least the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Bush’s first SEC chairman - Harvey Pitt, a prominent securities lawyer - was brought down by political missteps. Pitt was replaced by Donaldson, who quit in 2005.

Critics, including McCain, say the SEC has been less active under its current chairman, Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman from California. It has spent less on enforcement and levied less in fines on wrongdoers, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“You can’t overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University.

In other areas, the Bush administration’s failures seem more a case of inaction. The administration, economists said, did little to curb the practices of mortgage brokers, who are regulated by the states. But Democrats in Congress were equally to blame for this, these economists said.

“The Democrats pushed affordable housing goals, even in the face of evidence that people who got the loans shouldn’t have gotten them,” said Robert Litan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington. “The no-money-down loans of 2005 and 2006 were a key part of the problem.”

“I blame the Democrats for demanding that Fannie Mae keep buying these loans,” said Litan, who was a budget official in the Clinton administration. “I blame the administration for going along with it.”

White House officials note that the administration did propose reforms of real estate settlement procedures and the Federal Housing Authority, two areas it had identified as posing the greatest systemic risk to markets. Democrats in Congress, they said, blocked these efforts.

When Bush named Paulson to replace Snow in 2006, the Treasury Department finally got an expert in markets. But early on, his focus was on improving the competitiveness of the U.S. financial sector, which he feared was losing ground to Europe and Asia

April 2001
"The Administration’s FY02 budget declares that the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is “a potential problem,” because "financial trouble of a large GSE could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.�??

Sept. 11, 2003 - The bush plan is revealed to congress. It would put in place, a regulatory body that would do the job congress was refusing to do. Guess who opposed it? National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats. The democrats believed it would their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

‘‘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.’’ �??

"I am very hopeful,‘’ said Dodd, the committee’s second- highest-ranking Democrat. Lawmakers "realize it’s important to get the GSEs off the radar screen and outside the cross hairs and get them back to doing what they should be doing, and that is providing affordable housing.‘’

GSEs are government-sponsored enterprise such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Let’s move forward to 2005

July 28, 2008 - The Senate Banking Committee approved a bill that would tighten oversight Fannie Mae and Freddie.

“The Republican-sponsored legislation would compel the companies to sell portfolio assets unrelated to their mortgage bond business. The approval followed rejection of a rival bill backed by Democrats that would have authorized a regulator to reduce the mortgage holdings without requiring such cuts.”

This is the one that was killed by democrats and FNMA/FDMC in favor of much weaker bill that provided a regulator but did not require any action.

``The portfolio limits are a very large sticking point for me,‘’ Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, told the banking committee today in Washington. The bill will now advance to the full Senate.

The Shelby bill ``includes measures that could cripple the ability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to carry out their mission to expand homeownership,‘’ Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in an e-mail statement.

``We cannot pass legislation that could limit Americans from owning homes and potentially harm our economy in the process.‘’ and this was on the weaker bill.

I am very hopeful,'' said Dodd, the committee's second- highest-ranking Democrat. Lawmakers realize it’s important to get the GSEs off the radar screen and outside the cross hairs and get them back to doing what they should be doing, and that is providing affordable housing.‘’

GSEs are government-sponsored enterprise such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And then there is this.

Update: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Invest in Lawmakers - OpenSecrets News

[dhickey]

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Wanted: Public reassurance on Wall Street cure
By MARIANNE MEANS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

WASHINGTON – In the early Bush administration years, still riding high with a complacent Republican Congress and a demoralized Democratic opposition, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned Vice President Dick Cheney that uncontrolled spending was producing dangerously high federal deficits, wiping out the huge surplus inherited from President Clinton.
[i]
O’Neill later disclosed that Cheney had cut him off, saying coldly that “deficits don’t matter.” The quote seemed odd for a fiscal conservative at the time, but now looks astoundingly stupid.[/i]

This is, of course, similar to that other bone-headed Cheney argument that invading Iraq was wonderful because the country had links to the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks and harbored vast weapons of mass destruction.

None of that proved to be true. Mercifully, Cheney, long thought to be the real power behind the Bush throne, is nowhere to be seen in the current financial meltdown.

We do hope Cheney is now on an around-the-world cruise with little communication, basking in the sunlight of the political wreckage he has left behind.

We also hope that he’s forgotten that silly legal argument that he’s really a part of the congressional branch of government, rather than the White House, a ploy to help him evade federal requirements that his records be made public.

Because if he’s part of Congress, why isn’t he trying to amend the power-grab of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and make the bailout more friendly to consumers whose money is at stake? Oh, well, that’s not his nature, is it?

So why do federal deficits matter when there’s a financial crisis that is basically due to bad loans and bad judgment on Wall Street? Why is it causing turmoil across both U.S. and world markets?

In that mysterious world where money (or its paper equivalent) passes around like peanuts, there is suddenly no money to pass.

The savviest congressional leaders of both parties profess not to know how this financial disaster came upon us, but they have dark suspicions – and should have.

Their questions of Paulson and his economic buddies during the hearings Tuesday were knowledgeable and elicited mostly financial double-talk. Even Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the brightest of the lot, didn’t seem to grasp it fully.

Wall Street’s grip on the U.S. financial system has been exposed as a fraud, conceived by a bunch of elite folks who figured out how to mystify the rest of us and enrich themselves.

Public trust never entered their minds. Their credo is confuse the suckers and take their money.

Even before the bailout plan was announced, the Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that the deficit for fiscal 2009 would reach $438 billion, a record. Under the bailout plan, the U.S. treasury would be authorized to spend money that could take the deficit to $900 billion.
[b]
That would rival the highest deficits in history, recorded in the Reagan administration. But Reagan tried to back down a little, quietly agreeing to some tax hikes despite his anti-tax rhetoric. And the wars he waged were against small countries and didn’t last very long.[/b]

Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain support the bailout plan, in principle, and object to its most offensive feature, the protection of huge golden parachutes for chief executives who have ruined their companies.

The congressional proposal that all such salaries should be capped at the same level as that of the president, which is $400,000, sounds sensible.

They each have some legal twists they would like to see, and no doubt the package can be improved. But it’s a start, and nobody can risk stopping to look around. Not now.

We will examine how we got here later, but for the moment we need some public reassurance.

And – conservatives, listen up – that can only come from the federal government. Among other things, that means an end to the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, guys. Like it or not.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/380252_meansonline24.html[/quote]

What do deficites have to do with the housing bubble? This person seems to be implying that if we didn’t have the deficites we would have had 700B lying around to bail out wall street. What does this have to do with the problem, the bubble.

The recession is just the correction and nobody’s fault until the gov’t messes with it. If the House goes the same was and the Senate, then both parties will be do blame fore interfering in the correction and possibly worsening the recession.

The deficite and gov’t spending is a whole nother issue and it would be a stretch to pin that on one party these days.

[dhickey]

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
So I’m assuming that youre saying that the Gramm Leach Bililey Act caused the problem, and that it was the Democrats who fucked everything up.

Well, let’s look at that closely. Who was in control of Congress in 1999?

Republicans.

Who was in that Congress? John McCain.

Now, if you want your Republicans taking the credit for Clinton’s balanced budget, then they have to take the blame for this motherfucker.

And that includes John McCain, who voted for the Act.[/quote]

Who said Republicans deserved credit for Clinton’s balanced budget? He pissed off a lot of Dems right after taking office. I give him credit for that.

[dhickey]

[quote]Demiajax wrote:

It is my belief that an essential function of GSEs is liquidity and many people cannot or choose not to understand this relatively simple fact. This is not all about deflecting credit risk.
[/quote]

I am not sure about what you mean by deflecting credit risk. If you mean lax credit standards coersion to make bad loans, it is certainly a big part of it.

What do you have to do to create a bubble? Increase demand.

How do you increase demand for housing? Give a loan to any swinging dick that can spell his name.

What happens once you created a speclutive bubble? Everybody wants in…bad.

What happens when you get staggering numbers of new lending institutions popping up every day? An impossible regulatory environment.

What happens when all of these lending institutions are competing for the same customers? Ridiculous lending practices.

There are few different fuck-ups at work here.

1. CRA - don’t have a heart attack. Started the housing bubble. Home priced started to increase at a greater rate than inflation.

1A)Clinton really put the pressure on to give loans to questionable borrowers. Home prices started to accerate even more.

2)Frenzy to get in on the housing bubble spawned fly by night lending institutions using questionable lending practices.

3. FNMA/FDMC Growing completly out of control and Democrats refusing to reign them in.

There was also the neat little accounting trick financial institutions discover to free up more reserve capital for investment. ok…4 fuckups.

[Ren]

Found a great article with some of the actual facts, such notables include:

The Phil-Gramm act was not the evil people (including myself at one point) have made it out to be and had very little to do with causing the crisis.

Democrats did not refuse to reign Freddie and Fannie in, A Republican controlled congress never even brought the measure up for consideration.

Clinton’s administration does get some blame for pushing the homeownership agenda though.

Bush gets flak for not pushing for more oversight (he did have a Republican majority in congress for a while)

Anyways, pretty good article (from what I read) that helps clear a lot of things and spread the blame around. Take a look:

Factcheck.org: Who Really Caused the Economic Crisis?

[dhickey]

[quote]Ren wrote:
Found a great article with some of the actual facts, such notables include:

The Phil-Gramm act was not the evil people (including myself at one point) have made it out to be and had very little to do with causing the crisis.

Democrats did not refuse to reign Freddie and Fannie in, A Republican controlled congress never even brought the measure up for consideration.
[/quote]

Oh but they did. You need to look a little harder.

[quote]

Clinton’s administration does get some blame for pushing the homeownership agenda though.

Bush gets flak for not pushing for more oversight (he did have a Republican majority in congress for a while)

Anyways, pretty good article (from what I read) that helps clear a lot of things and spread the blame around. Take a look:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/161936[/quote]

[dhickey]

i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

[Tiribulus]

[quote]dhickey wrote:
i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

[/quote]

You’re wasting your breath man.

Bringing evidence to the socialized sheep is like shooting BB’s at the Rock of Gibraltar.

No effect whatsoever. If the House, Senate and Whitehouse were populated exclusively by liberal democrats it would still be somebody else,s fault. Probably George W. Bush. Even if he had never been born.

[Sloth]

Ron Paul “You’re Going To Guarantee A Depression!”

- YouTube

[Ren]

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
dhickey wrote:
i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

You’re wasting your breath man.

Bringing evidence to the socialized sheep is like shooting BB’s at the Rock of Gibraltar.

No effect whatsoever. If the House, Senate and Whitehouse were populated exclusively by liberal democrats it would still be somebody else,s fault. Probably George W. Bush. Even if he had never been born. [/quote]

I am reading mixed reports on whether or not it made it out of the committee, do you have a source that you can refer me to for that?

[dhickey]

[quote]Ren wrote:
Tiribulus wrote:
dhickey wrote:
i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

You’re wasting your breath man.

Bringing evidence to the socialized sheep is like shooting BB’s at the Rock of Gibraltar.

No effect whatsoever. If the House, Senate and Whitehouse were populated exclusively by liberal democrats it would still be somebody else,s fault. Probably George W. Bush. Even if he had never been born.

I am reading mixed reports on whether or not it made it out of the committee, do you have a source that you can refer me to for that?
[/quote]

It never made it out of committee. the dems (all of them)in the commity blocked it. that why a republican majority didn’t mean shit. just do a search for - senate banking committee 2005 fnma

[Tiribulus]

[quote]Ren wrote:
Tiribulus wrote:
dhickey wrote:
i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

You’re wasting your breath man.

Bringing evidence to the socialized sheep is like shooting BB’s at the Rock of Gibraltar.

No effect whatsoever. If the House, Senate and Whitehouse were populated exclusively by liberal democrats it would still be somebody else,s fault. Probably George W. Bush. Even if he had never been born.

I am reading mixed reports on whether or not it made it out of the committee, do you have a source that you can refer me to for that?
[/quote]

Here http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109-190 you can find comprehensive info on all actions of congress regarding this bill. The status if “introduced” only, shows that it never made it out of committee. At least that’s been my understanding the times I’ve used this site. gpoaccess.gov is another good one for getting information on the congressional record.

[Tiribulus]

[quote]dhickey wrote:
Ren wrote:
Tiribulus wrote:
dhickey wrote:
i’ll help you out.

"In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby.

The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on ‘deregulation.’"

You’re wasting your breath man.

Bringing evidence to the socialized sheep is like shooting BB’s at the Rock of Gibraltar.

No effect whatsoever. If the House, Senate and Whitehouse were populated exclusively by liberal democrats it would still be somebody else,s fault. Probably George W. Bush. Even if he had never been born.

I am reading mixed reports on whether or not it made it out of the committee, do you have a source that you can refer me to for that?

It never made it out of committee. the dems (all of them)in the commity blocked it. that why a republican majority didn’t mean shit. just do a search for - senate banking committee 2005 fnma[/quote]

Quite so. They did not want the light of day shined on that operation for sure. Now that it cannot be hidden any longer it is spellbinding watching the Republicans and George Bush being blamed and I am no enthusiastic supporter of either.