Getting It Half Right

The mainstream media never hesitates to rewrite history when it is to their advantage, but every now and again they accidentally begin to report actual facts.

The Nation posted an article yesterday about the role Bill Clinton played in the 2008 mortgage meltdown. This information is readily available information that the mainstream media has so far ignored.

The article reports:

Candidate Clinton is essentially whitewashing the financial catastrophe. She has produced a clumsy rewrite of what caused the 2008 collapse, one that conveniently leaves her husband out of the story. He was the president who legislated the predicate for Wall Street’s meltdown. Hillary Clinton’s redefinition of the reform problem deflects the blame from Wall Street’s most powerful institutions, like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, and instead fingers less celebrated players that failed. In roundabout fashion, Hillary Clinton sounds like she is assuring old friends and donors in the financial sector that, if she becomes president, she will not come after them.

The seminal event that sowed financial disaster was the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated banking into different realms: investment banks, which organize capital investors for risk-taking ventures; and deposit-holding banks, which serve people as borrowers and lenders. That law’s repeal, a great victory for Wall Street, was delivered by Bill Clinton in 1999, assisted by the Federal Reserve and the financial sector’s armies of lobbyists. The “universal banking model” was saluted as a modernizing reform that liberated traditional banks to participate directly and indirectly in long-prohibited and vastly more profitable risk-taking.

While that is true, you need to take a step back and look at what actually made that change necessary. Due to some changes in federal regulations and pressure by groups like ACORN, banks were forced to issue loans to people who could not pay them back. This sub-prime loans were doomed to fail, and banks needed to find a way to cut their loses. The issuing of the sub-prime mortgages goes back to a law passed during the Carter administration that was put on steroids during the Clinton administration. When the Bush administration called for curbs on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, they were rebuffed by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank in Congress. It was later revealed that Chris Dodd had a ‘friends and family’ mortgage from one of the major players in the sub-prime mortgage market.

For the entire story, please watch the video below. I have posted it before; it is not new. I am embedding it because I am afraid that it will disappear from YouTube.

 

This is the real story of what happened in the economic meltdown.