2008 mortgage crisis/Clinton/rebuttals
The accusations against Clinton did not go unanswered.
While most economists blame the current crisis on market failure and sparse regulation, conservatives are attempting to elude responsibility by smearing the victims of predatory lending. As Matt Yglesias points out, "it was conservatives who watched as the housing bubble developed and it was conservatives who blocked any action to try to ensure a soft landing once the bubble popped".It was conservatives who blocked efforts to curb predatory lending and it was conservatives who blocked efforts to investigate fraud more robustly.
Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977; Bush started weakening enforcement in 2004. Which act do you think was more likely to have been the cause of a crisis in 2008?
But stop the presses -- this connection (blaming the 1977 CRA for the current meltdown) was refuted back in April:
- 2008-04-07 Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?
...it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA. .. Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending.
The people pushing this meme are not interested in facts, however, knowing that a large chunk -- perhaps a majority -- of voters believe that "you can prove anything with facts".