GregNews

Matt Lewis: In 1999, the New York Times reported that, “the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these [...]

CNN’s Jeff Miron: Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen. Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street’s hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets [...]

Four years ago… My favorite part is Rep. Lacy Clay calling it a “lynching” of Franklin Raines. So, you get the double whammie of a defense of the guy who cooked Fannie Mae’s books with overstated earnings while personally making $90 million during his five year stint as Fannie Mae CEO, combined with subtle race [...]

At the root of this mess is not the failure of capitalism but political interference in the market. It was Democrats who pushed for and passed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that forced banks to serve their “whole communities” and required them to offer loans to people who were not credit worthy. In 1995, [...]

UPDATE: or see this commentary by Mark Krikorian from 1993! A long excerpt from Stan Liebowitz: The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives decided that it needed to be “fixed.” Their complaint: Some ethnic groups got approved for mortgages at lower rates than others. In reality, mortgage lenders [...]