Sunday, April 19, 2015

Earth to Hillary: It Was Bill, Not 'the 1%,' That Crashed Housing

Election '16: With typical gall, Hillary Clinton in her campaign launch lit into "those at the top" for "stacking" the deck against middle-class families when in fact they are buried under the house of cards built by her husband.
Earth to Hillary: It wasn't the richest 1% or Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy and created the financial wreckage from which working Americans "have fought" to dig themselves out of. No, that path to destruction was set by Bill Clinton and his social housing policies.
The evidence is overwhelming that Clinton was the architect of the financial disaster that wiped out trillions of dollars in household wealth. Under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open.
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Through executive order, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under a little-known task force to enforce new "flexible" mortgage underwriting guidelines to boost low-income and minority homeownership.
For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income borrowers with spotty credit. The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders eventually abandoned prudent underwriting altogether.
The next year, Clinton set quotas for lending in high-risk neighborhoods under an overhauled Community Reinvestment Act, while adding several hundred bank examiners to enforce the tougher CRA rules. Banks that came up short had expansion plans put on hold — a slow death sentence in an era of bank mergers and acquisitions.
For the first time, CRA ratings were made public, egging on ACORN and other radical inner-city groups, which used the reports to extort banks for $6 trillion in subprime loan set-asides by 2008.


Read the rest of this IBD Editorial HERE.

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