Politicians Take Credit for Boom but not the Blame for Foreclosures

June 3rd, 2009

Politicians are careful to take the credit for the boom but never the blame for the foreclosure bust. When disaster strikes they scuttle to Washington taking cover while looking around for all shades of scapegoats. The latter would be put up before Congressional committees, accused across television screens for the catastrophes created by the very committees who are doing the finger pointing.

The word that is being repeated with ceasing in these charades staged by politicians is ‘deregulation’.

The idea being put forth is that it was because of weak government supervision that permitted the multiplication of greed in the private sector to raise its ugly head. In such a situation only the politicians can save the nation.

By going through the government records the utter nonsense of it can be verified. It was the government regulators who introduced these dubitable mortgages and it was the legislators belonging to both the parties who egged on the regulators, the financial bodies like banks as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept these dangerous mortgages. It was all done in the name of ‘affordable housing’ and getting more Americans to own homes.

The leaders of both the parties echoed these views and jumped into the fray.

Few people have the time to hunt up the records of the Congress and comb through other documents to uncover the naked truth about the string of bizarre lies emanating from Washington and being parroted by the media. However not all can be silenced. It has been recently published in a book form named The Housing Boom and Bust.

When the housing boom was chugging along happily, Rep Barney Frank was proudly edging on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into dangerous waters using the mantra of ‘affordable housing.’ Frank said in 2003, “I believe that we, as the federal government, have probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

It meant that when the mood was upbeat he was happy to admit that it was the federal government that was goading on the real estate market in the right direction. On its own it would not have been able to do so. But when defaults and foreclosures reared their ugly heads Frank began to sing another song.