Over the last month I’ve had to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of various investment banks and the culminating bailout to a wide variety of family members, friends and acquaintances. As someone who for 18 years was in the belly of the beast that was (and is) the financial services industry, I know a little about the subject. One of the main canards I hear from the preternaturally stupid people on the left is the mantra of “Bush’s eight years of failed economic policies” have led us to where we are today. In addition to being a lie, it is also indicative of the blind, cultish fanaticism that pervades the left. When I attempt to compare the economic realities that existed in 2006, when Dems were voted into a majority in the House and Senate, versus where we are today, none of it filters through. None. There is no reasoning, no talking, no exposition of facts detailed enough to convince these people. It is a seemingly impossible task.
In The American Thinker on October 26, M. Jay Wells wrote what I think is a definitive essay on the real reasons for our financial crisis, going back (as I stated in a post a month ago) with the passage of a little law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). In “Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened,” Wells details the history of the crisis from the tipping point of CRA, and the organizations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and ACORN, who took full advantage of it, doing their level, mostly unintentional, best in almost destroying our banking system with trillions of dollars of bad loans. Wells writes that “[c]ontrary to the Obama narrative […] it is not free-market capitalism at the root of the current mortgage industry crisis, but rather the very socialism [he] hawks. The historical record makes this fact unmistakably clear.”
The entire article is included below the fold. Read it and keep it close. Facts are stubborn things, Ronald Reagan was fond of saying; they can’t be denied. The sad fact is that the country is witnessing the consequences of failed Socialist policies — and possibly heading further into the abyss with its eyes closed and its mind, such as it is, made up.
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