Maxine, the fox guarding the hen house. Stephen Moore gives us a sweet bit of history regarding the financial crisis. Don’t you just love those Dems and their pious self righteousness ! Nancy
By Stephen Moore • Stephen Moore, a columnist for The Washington Times, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book with Arthur Laffer is “Trumponomics.”
November 11, 2018
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee. Ms. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, “we are going to do to them, what they did to us.” I’m not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox to guard the hen house.
Back during he the financial crisis of 2008-09, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut were the cosponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to “roll the dice” on the housing market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being discharged dishonorably from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
The partial repeal of Dodd Frank could have gone farther, but it’s a good start.
In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and President Obama signed it into law. The legislation, more than 2,000 pages long, imposed cumbersome regulations on financial institutions, which the bill’s authors took to be responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recession. The law also established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, an advocacy agency for consumers that, to no one’s surprise, quickly turned into a Naderite anti-corporation attack dog.
Complicated laws passed in the middle of a crisis are guaranteed to make things worse in the long run, and so Dodd-Frank proved. The Democrats, who controlled both House and Senate in 2010, took the blinkered view that the financial crisis had come about exclusively thanks to the unregulated excesses of the private-sector financial industry; regulating that industry was, for them, the only rational response. The law thus deprived the market of liquidity in the middle of a recession—with predictable results.
The Democrats ignored two important points. First, the role of the federal government itself: Government-backed mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae—then as now boasting powerful allies in Congress—encouraged precisely the sort of risky and foolish loans that led directly to the housing-market collapse and attendant financial meltdown. Second, what many of the investment banks did was already illegal: “cooking the books,” to use the popular term. To that extent, it was an enforcement problem, not a regulatory one. Greater regulation of investment banks largely missed the point—though it allowed powerful Democrats in Congress to blame someone other than themselves for the crisis. (The bill’s authors, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, both had a long history of encouraging Fannie and Freddie’s worst practices.) One of the law’s further follies is that it shackled small and mid-sized banks with the same provisions despite the fact that they had nothing to do with the financial crisis.
In Part 2 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle flips Hillary’s claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by tax cuts for the wealthy, and explains who the REAL villains are
During the debate, Mrs. Clinton returned to the same line we’ve been fed for eight years: there’s an economic boom waiting in the Green Economy. No, there isn’t. In Part 3 of this 6 part series, Bill takes apart Hillary’s energy plans and examines the consequences to the planet.
Surely there was no greater missed opportunity in the first debate than listening to HILLARY CLINTON talk about how “concerned” she is about the security of classified government information.Bill Whittle rushes in where CNN fears to tread.
Hillary Clinton says she has a “plan” to “really squeeze ISIS in Syria.” It seems like Syria might be squeezed enough already. In Part 5 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle lays out the historical facts that show that Clinton and Obama CREATED ISIS.
Federal obligations and guarantees have ballooned since 2009. Taxpayers are on the hook for trillions.
By
GEORGE MELLOAN
Mr. Melloanis a former deputy editor of the Journal editorial page. His book “When the New Deal Came to Town” will be published by Simon & Schuster in November.
If you asked most Americans how much loan risk they’ve undertaken over the last decade, they would probably look puzzled. Few are in the lending business.
But how about the risk Americans have taken on collectively, through the lending and loan guarantees of the federal government? The exposure of taxpayers to delinquencies and defaults on federal loans and guarantees has ballooned since 2009. Add that to the soaring national debt and the excessive obligations of federal entitlement programs and you have what some might call an “existential” issue.
“Stimulus” programs have more than doubled the national debt—while providing little stimulus—sinceBarack Obamatook office. The budgetary cost of servicing that debt will double over the next decade, even if the Federal Reserve manages to keep interest rates at current low levels. It’s also widely understood that without serious reforms there is no way the government can fulfill the promises made to oldsters and the disabled by Social Security and other safety-net programs.
Let’s revisit this piece of financial history, before Hillary rewrites it.
By Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore– Larry Kudlow is a contributing editor ofNational Review. Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.— May 28, 2016
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Under his HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It’s a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and all the great investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, which helps account for his amazing business success.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard-working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”
So she’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman — something she would know almost nothing about because she’s never actually run a business (though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle-futures market).
Hillary’s new TV ads say Trump predicted the real-estate crash in 2006 (good call) and then bought real estate at low prices when the housing crash that few others foresaw arrived in 2008. Many builders went out of business during the crash, but Trump read the market perfectly.
What is so hypocritical about this Clinton attack is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits. Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let’s look at the many ways the Clintons and their cronies contributed to the housing implosion and Great Recession.
Washington is a place where bad ideas go to live forever. How else to explain the latest innovation from federal regulators to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dominating the market for mortgage finance?
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, these two government-created behemoths owned or guaranteed more than $5 trillion in mortgage debt. When the housing boom went bust, taxpayers were forced to provide a $188 billion bailout to the toxic twins—and endure an historic financial crisis. So the taxpayer interest is in shrinking and eventually shutting down Fan and Fred.
But these days the Federal Housing Finance Agency that supervises the twins under federal “conservatorship” seems to view itself as the official preserver of Fan and Fred’s market share. So instead of simply telling the mortgage giants to stop buying and guaranteeing so many mortgages, the regulator has been encouraging the use of ever more complex financial instruments to keep Fan and Fred at the center of this multi-trillion-dollar market.
One Fan and Fred innovation—check your wallet when that word is used in government—is to use synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to offload some of the mortgage risk they are holding. These new instruments are essentially a way for the mortgage giants to buy insurance against the possibility that lots of mortgage borrowers don’t repay the money they owe. But how about simply not holding these risks in the first place? Then taxpayers would have no need for insurance.
Fan and Fred are selling the CDOs to private investors, who are getting compensated with juicy yields in return for theoretically accepting much of the default risk in Fan and Fred’s bundles of mortgages. The program is ramping up and now covers at least some of the risks on more than $800 billion in mortgages of the more than $4 trillion that Fan and Fred still own or guarantee.
BOOK REVIEW –HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again
by Peter J. Wallison
Mortgage Madness
Blame for the 2008 financial collapse is, and should be, widespread.
Jay Cost
June 1, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 36
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Wallison ends on a distressing note. He asserts that because experts have embraced a false narrative about the crisis, the remedy of Dodd-Frank will not protect us from the next calamity. Actually, it’s worse than this. The answer to the financial crisis may have been hidden in plain sight, but the failure to see it was willful. A powerful coalition of interest groups dominated housing policy for a generation, and they still do—despite the damage that policy caused in the Great Recession.
In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. . . . He who determines what politics is about runs the country.” Schattschneider calls the organized effort to ensure that some alternatives remain illegitimate “the mobilization of bias.”
Peter J. Wallison must be quite familiar with this idea. A longtime critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) tasked with injecting liquidity into the secondary mortgage market, he has offered warnings about these agencies that have fallen on deaf ears for over a decade. When he and Edward Pinto, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly pointed out that Fannie and Freddie were loaded up with the subprime mortgages that contributed to the financial collapse of 2008, and that maybe—just maybe—this had something to do with the mess, they were greeted with accusations of Hitlerism. “The Big Lie” is what Joe Nocera of the New York Times accused Wallison and Pinto of propagating.
There are some ideas that simply cannotgain mainstream acceptance because they challenge essential priorities of the ruling elite. Accordingly, any connection drawn from Fannie and Freddie to the financial collapse mustbe squashed, because distributing federally subsidized credit to low- and middle-income (LMI) borrowers has been a backbone of the nation’s housing policy for nearly 20 years. All of this makes Wallison’s work intriguing to anybody inclined to question the status quo—even more so because he has written this excellent book in defense of his thesis. (more…)
PETER J. WALLISON holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and in New York. He also served as White House Counsel in the Reagan Administration. A graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Wallison received his law degree from Harvard Law School and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He is the editor, co-editor, author, or co-author of numerous books, including Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on November 5, 2013, during a conference entitled “Dodd-Frank: A Law Like No Other,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig Von Mises Lecture Series.
The 2008 financial crisis was a major event, equivalent in its initial scope—if not its duration—to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time, many commentators said that we were witnessing a crisis of capitalism, proof that the free market system was inherently unstable. Government officials who participated in efforts to mitigate its effects claim that their actions prevented a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system, an idea that has found acceptance among academic and other observers, particularly the media. These views culminated in the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act that is founded on the notion that the financial system is inherently unstable and must be controlled by government regulation.
We will never know, of course, what would have happened if these emergency actions had not been taken, but it is possible to gain an understanding of why they were considered necessary—that is, the causes of the crisis.
Why is it important at this point to examine the causes of the crisis? After all, it was five years ago, and Congress and financial regulators have acted, or are acting, to prevent a recurrence. Even if we can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the crisis, some will argue that the new regulations now being put in place under Dodd-Frank will make a repetition unlikely. Perhaps. But these new regulations have almost certainly slowed economic growth and the recovery from the post-crisis recession, and they will continue to do so in the future. If regulations this pervasive were really necessary to prevent a recurrence of the financial crisis, then we might be facing a legitimate trade-off in which we are obliged to sacrifice economic freedom and growth for the sake of financial stability. But if the crisis did not stem from a lack of regulation, we have needlessly restricted what most Americans want for themselves and their children.
It is not at all clear that what happened in 2008 was the result of insufficient regulation or an economic system that is inherently unstable. On the contrary, there is compelling evidence that the financial crisis was the result of the government’s own housing policies. These in turn, as we will see, were based on an idea—still popular on the political left—that underwriting standards in housing finance are discriminatory and unnecessary. In today’s vernacular, it’s called “opening the credit box.” These policies, as I will describe them, were what caused the insolvency of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and ultimately the financial crisis. They are driven ideologically by the left, but the political muscle in Washington is supplied by what we should call the Government Mortgage Complex—the realtors, the homebuilders, and the banks—for whom freely available government-backed mortgage money is a source of great profit.
The Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, established in 1934, was authorized to insure mortgages up to 100 percent, but it required a 20 percent down payment and operated with very few delinquencies for 25 years. However, in the serious recession of 1957, Congress loosened these standards to stimulate the growth of housing, moving down payments to three percent between 1957 and 1961. Predictably, this resulted in a boom in FHA insured mortgages and a bust in the late ’60s. The pattern keeps recurring, and no one seems to remember the earlier mistakes. We loosen mortgage standards, there’s a bubble, and then there’s a crash. Other than the taxpayers, who have to cover the government’s losses, most of the people who are hurt are those who bought in the bubble years, and found—when the bubble deflated—that they couldn’t afford their homes. (more…)
Book Review: ‘The Map and the Territory,’ by Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan argues that Wall Street didn’t predict the 2008 crisis because it paid scant attention to the insights of behavioral economics.
Burton G. Malkiel
Oct. 22, 2013
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Bubbles and crashes will always be characteristics of free-market systems, but they need not lead to economic crises. In 1987 the stock market fell over 20% in a single day, but the effect on economic activity was minimal because holders of common stock weren’t highly leveraged. The bursting of the Internet bubble in early 2000 left only a mild imprint on the financial system and the real economy for the same reason. The crash of the housing bubble was devastating because the toxic mortgage-backed assets were held by highly leveraged institutions, and this debt was short-term rather than “permanent” and thus especially susceptible to “runs” where lenders were unwilling to “roll over” their short-term loans. “It was the capital impairment on the balance sheets of financial institutions that provoked the crisis,” Mr. Greenspan writes. In his view, the answer is not more regulation but more capital.
“The Map and the Territory” ranges beyond the market crisis and predictive models. Mr. Greenspan offers a conservative but balanced discussion, for instance, of the need to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. In his section on income inequality he emphasizes the role of globalization and the rise in stock-based compensation, as well as the failure of our education system to produce skills for the workforce that match the needs of the economy. He says that immigration reform, by loosening the requirements for H-1B visas, would allow us to draw on a large pool of skilled workers abroad and thus stabilize income inequality. At the moment, immigration restrictions protect, and thus subsidize, high-income earners from global wage competition.
The financial crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that followed forced each of us—perhaps most notably, Alan Greenspan —to question the fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. Mr. Greenspan, the nation’s chief forecaster as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, steered the nation through almost two decades of prosperity and relative stability, retiring from the Fed in 2006 with an unparalleled reputation for prescience. And then came the economic crisis, and no one’s reputation for prescience survived.
In prepared remarks before a congressional hearing a month after Lehman’s September 2008 bankruptcy, Mr. Greenspan declared: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.” He was hardly alone in failing to predict the economic tsunami. Equally clueless were government officials, Wall Street practitioners and professional economists. In “The Map and the Territory,” Mr. Greenspan tries to explain what went wrong and offers suggestions for how we can do a better job. (more…)
Republicans lost the election by failing to pin the Great Recession on Democratic housing policies mandating affirmative-action lending. They’ll lose even worse if they adopt Democratic racial politics.
Democrats have perfected the dark art of identifying and dividing Americans by race and class and promising favored groups special economic “rights” and entitlements. Republicans will always lose to them in a pandering contest.
Republicans win — and win big — when they transcend tribal politics and appeal to all Americans as individuals, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980. They also win when they shoot straight with voters, using hard facts and logic to explain tough issues.
Mitt Romney failed to do this. He made a strategic mistake by not re-emphasizing the origins of the mortgage crisis and recession. By letting stand President Obama’s false narrative that “Wall Street fat cats” like him caused the mess that Obama couldn’t get us out of, Romney became a victim of that very narrative.
The Republican National Committee thinks the long primary season doomed Romney. In fact, the primaries offered a raft of free airtime to sort fact from fiction about why so many Americans lost their jobs, incomes, home equity and retirement.
Only, Romney never took advantage of it.
He had numerous prime-time chances to explain to voters that Washington, not Wall Street, was responsible for the vast majority (70%) of the 28 million subprime and other weak home loans that went bust in 2008 (by virtue of the “affordable housing” quotas government enforced through HUD-regulated Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA and through the Community Reinvestment Act).
He could have easily documented how the government ordered lenders to “target” low-income minorities directly in marketing efforts to satisfy regulators; how the lines between subprime and prime were “blurred,” intentionally, on government orders; and how Obama doubled down on these reckless housing policies, even reappointing many of the original architects of President Clinton’s disastrous minority homeownership strategy.
Once lower affirmative-action lending standards — nothing down, weak credit — were incorporated into Fannie’s and Freddie’s automated underwriting programs, they became the standard across the entire mortgage industry for all borrowers. They also contaminated the mortgage-backed securities industry.
During those 20 televised debates, Romney could have at least forced some national media coverage about the government’s role in the crisis. It could have changed public opinion just enough to win the election.
He didn’t. Instead, exit polls show a majority of voters blamed Republicans and Wall Street even for Obama’s jobless recovery (more…)
