They gave your mortgage to a less qualified minority...

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable

By TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:30 PM PT

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

IBD Exclusive Series: What Caused The Loan Crisis?

The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren't enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market " a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

September 28, 2008
McCain/Palin Could Win this Election by Exposing the Trillion Dollar Scam
James Lewis
Sarah Barracuda could win this election on Friday night for the Republicans. All she needs is the courage to tell the truth in her debate with human gaffe machine Joe Biden -- with John McCain's permission and support -- to tell it like it is.

If the great American middle class ever figures out the trillion dollar phony mortgage scam from Freddie and Fannie, they will finally rise up in wrath and throw the liberal bums out. Let it start hitting their pocket books, their ATM cards and credit cards, let their home prices fall like a rock -- and Barack Obama will be out of politics, along with the Democrat majority in Congress.

For conservatives this is the opportunity of the century.

That is why the Democrats are screaming with fear about the abyss that has suddenly opened at their feet. Since the Carter Administration first threatened the banks with punishment if they didn't allow themselves to be robbed by sub-prime borrowers, since the Clinton Administration made it all even worse in 1995, even the Democrats have known full well that the bills had to come due at some time.

There is a sane reason why bankers and trustees have to exercise "due diligence" over other people's money. All the politicians are lawyers, and they know about money and theft. But "due diligence" was criminalized for bankers through Federal law. They were compelled, on penalty of law, to lend money at high-risk through Fannie and Freddie. It is the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 all over again, where everybody bought stocks on margin until they could see the abyss opening up at their feet. Well, this time it was the Feds who created an insane lending scheme themselves. The US Government threatened to punish bankers for "redlining" -- which in real life means giving money only to people who can pay it back.

You can only bend the market through coercion for so long -- then things fall apart. That's what's happened here.

The taxpayers are now on the hook for a trillion dollars, if you add the failed 300 billion dollar rescue package from two weeks ago to the 700 billion dollar Paulson package. This is a trillion dollar scam, and all the politicians in Congress, the ACORN mafia, the people who played the market on unsecured mortgages, and the scam artists who were hired by Freddie and Fannie -- they all knew it. In case you haven't been watching, that includes all of Barack Obama's "home mortgage advisors" -- Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Jamie Gorelick. It includes Senate Banking Committee members like Chris Dodd. It includes House members like Barney Frank. Watch this video and you can see them strutting their stuff when the US watchdog agency criticized Fannie and Freddie in 2003.

They knew exactly what was going on.

This crisis is not financial -- it is political. It's not a market failure. It's a decades-long robbery by the Left, finally exposed for what it is.

The Democrats deserve the wrath of the voters this time.

Sarah Palin could defeat Obama and Biden Friday night. All she has to do is tell the truth about the Democrats and the Trillion Dollar Scam. Not to do so would be collude in a massive Ponzi scheme, designed to fall on the shoulders of the taxpayers.

This is precisely why we have elections.

John McCain and Sarah Palin will need a lot of guts to do this. But the scam has to be exposed, or the fetid wounds in the financial sector will fester and metastasize.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com.

Tags: politics, racist crap

Even if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal -- and he wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the financial markets.