I like tea, what?

IT geek, foodie, outdoor enthusiast.

Some of the better politics quotes I've seen lately:

Ctrl-Alt-Del: ManFromNowhere: History lesson time:

The housing bubble can be traced back to one piece of legislation: the Community Reinvestment Act

You, sir, are either a blithering idiot or a shameless farking liar. Or both.

The CRA had nothing to do with the housing and mortgage crisis in this country. Nothing. Not only were the majority of the institutions involved in the subrime crisis (and the subsequent mess) NOT regulated by the CRA, a recent study shows that CRA Banks were substantially less likely than other lenders to make the kinds of risky home purchase loans that helped fuel the foreclosure crisis.

- the repeal of Glass Steagall protections by the Financial Services Modernization Act
- the exemption of extremely risky securities from regulation through the Commodities Futures Modernization Act
- SEVENTEEN consecutive interest rate cuts by Greenspan,
- combined with the never ending stream of rhetoric from the Bush Whitehouse about the "ownership society"
- which led to a feeding frenzy of epic proportions in the housing markets, and consumption in general
- the abysmally stupid decision by the SEC to waive leverage rules
- the illiquidity caused by the subsequent 30 to 1 leverage ratios when the mortgages started to go down the crapper
- the 100 million dollar lobbying effort by the banks to change bankruptcy laws
- The Bush administrations successful dismantling of virtually all State regulations and banking laws through the preemption doctrine, despite the objections of all 50 State Attorneys general and all 50 State banking superintendents.
- the creation of ever riskier asset backed securities and collateralized debt obligations,
- the agencies that rate securities and the fact that they get fees from the companies whose products they are rating
- the use of credit default swaps to "insure' these crap securities and the undercapitalization of said insurance
- the fact that the financial forecasting models used by all these securities companies and hedge funds weren't updated to account for all the newly created event risk associated with the newly created POS CDOs

Virtually every one of these items can be traced back to the Bush administration (via the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Securities and Exchange Commision, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, etc), Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, banking industry lobbiests, and the senior management of banks themselves.

When you're prepared to discuss the overuse of credit arbitrage by huge hedge funds combined with the seemingly bottomless greed of lenders which led them to abandon long standing lending standards like employment history, income, down payments, credit rating, assets, property loan-to-value ratio and debt-servicing ability just to sell more mortgages that could be bundled into unregulated, improperly rated securities and sold off to unregulated financial institutions in a chain of overlevereged, badly modeled, underinsured, unregulated transactions, when you're ready to have that discussion, come on back and maybe you can sit at the grown-ups table.

Until then though, take your hacktackular partisan talking points about the Democrats and the CRA and shove them back into the orifice you obviously pulled them out of.

My heart goes out to you. Perhaps you should seek a refund.

***

log_jammin: The democrats are trying to fix problems. when you try to fix problems you run into obstacle you have to overcome. Then people get pissy because the problem is taking too long to fix/costs too much/no magic unicorns.

But not only are the republicans saying fixing it will make things worse, they're saying they aren't supposed to fix problems at all. so all they have to do is point to failures and delays while they sit back and do nothing.

while the democrats are painting the house, the republicans are sitting under a shade tree, drinking a beer telling them they got the wrong paint, are leaving runs and missing spots.

Courtesy of TehNacho.