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Foreign Invaders crisis cost $150B in 2023, forcing some areas to cut police and fire services: report Israel kills head of Hezbollah Intelligence. Status: Not Logged In; Sign In United States News See other United States News Articles Title: Happy 10th Birthday, Bush Tax Cuts! You've been a failure in every conceivable way Source: Slate URL Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2296578 Published: Jun 10, 2011 Author: Annie Lowery Post Date: 2011-06-10 10:59:53 by go65 Keywords: None Views: 42385 Comments: 143 Unfortunately, the tax cuts never translated into robust economic growth, either. Indeed, the aughts saw the worst growth since World War II. From 2001 to 2007, annual GDP growth averaged just 2.4 percent per year, lower than in any other postwar business cycle. The contrast is starker still when judging against the previous decade. In real terms, GDP grew half as much from 2001 to 2010 as from 1991 to 2000. Click for Full Text! Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread   Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 127. #3. To: go65 (#0) The disaster that was the Booosh Tax cuts is so apparent that it's not even worth debating any more. war  posted on  2011-06-10   11:17:24 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #6. To: war (#3) (Edited) The disaster that was the Booosh Tax cuts is so apparent that it's not even worth debating any more. I love how you make drive-by accusations then refuse to back up anything you proclaim by couching your language in weasel words. You need to go back to the disinformation collective and brush up on your skills, comrade. Rudgear  posted on  2011-06-10   11:31:34 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #7. To: Rudgear (#6) We went from surplus to deficit in the wink of an eye. The debt EXPLODED and the tax "cuts" did absolutely nothing. Our fiscal problems and the fact that we cannot inplement a TRUE Keynsian solution to the current economic ennui can be traced back to those cuts. Those are all proven facts. There's nothing drive-by about it at all. Those cuts were the pinnacle of fiscal irresponsibility - a trait that the GOP demonstrates every time that it gets into power. war  posted on  2011-06-10   11:36:34 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #15. To: war (#7) We went from surplus to deficit in the wink of an eye. Clinton tech bust and the irresponsible CRA. Yes, Sink boy truly was the gift that keeps on giving. no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   12:23:37 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #18. To: no gnu taxes (#15) Clinton tech bust and the irresponsible CRA. Yes, Sink boy truly was the gift that keeps on giving. You have an amazing ability to argue both that the Bush administration economic policies were a resounding success, and that the economy crashed under Bush due to Clinton. Amazing. go65  posted on  2011-06-10   12:28:09 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #21. To: go65 (#18) He's become more absurd over the past few months. His rebuttal to just about any economic point is "CRA!!!!" He hates it that ni**ers can buy houses. war  posted on  2011-06-10   12:33:48 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #26. To: war (#21) His rebuttal to just about any economic point is "CRA!!! Why wouldn't it be? no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   12:41:27 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #29. To: no gnu taxes (#26) (Edited) That article blames the CRA for "lax lending standards" while offering absolutely no proof that it did. Meanwhile, time after time, you have been given empirical data that CRA had zipola to do with the financial crisis. Believe me, we all "get" that you hate ni**ers owning homes. war  posted on  2011-06-10   12:45:35 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #30. To: war (#29) Weren’t the majority of the subprime loans made by mortgage service companies not subject to the CRA? This is true. But it is largely beside the point. A huge driver of the demand for subprime loans was the demand for CRA bonds. Banks operating under the CRA could meet their obligations by buying up CRA loans or MBS built from CRA loans. The CRA created a demand that the mortgage servicers were meeting. What's more, many smaller mortage service companies hoped to be acquired by larger banks. Increasing their CRA lending made them more attractive take-over targets. A study put out by the Treasury Department in 2000 found that the CRA was encouraging the mortgage servicers to provide loans to low-income borrowers, in part because the CRA loans had been so successful. Finally, the Clinton adminstration threatened to subject the mortgage companies to the CRA if they didn't comply voluntarily. They promptly agreed to increase their CRA-type lending in order to escape the kind of public scrutiny that comes with official CRA regulated status. no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   12:54:47 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #33. To: no gnu taxes (#30) Banks operating under the CRA could meet their obligations by buying up CRA loans or MBS built from CRA loans. Chuckles...pure bullshit. There was no disclosure of the origin of the loans within a particular MBS. In other words, Paddy, you had 0 idea if a particular bundling contained a loan made under CRA guidelines. As long as a loan met the pooling requirements of FN/FM, it was in. war  posted on  2011-06-10   13:15:33 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #40. To: war (#33) Ans FNMA sure thinks there is "disclosure." Do you originate Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)-targeted mortgages or are you seeking to purchase a CRA-targeted investment? Fannie Mae can help you participate in our CRA-targeted Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). This MBS is an investment vehicle tailored specifically for depositories and other investors in community development. https://www.efanniemae.com/sf/ip/cra/mbs.jsp no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   13:37:52 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #43. To: no gnu taxes (#40) Keep googling... war  posted on  2011-06-10   13:53:43 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #45. To: war (#43) Interesting blurb here: -- Dale Westhoff is senior managing director of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., New York. He has been ranked No. 1 in prepayment analysis by Institutional Investor Institutional Investor Bear, Stearns pioneered and is the leading underwriter of CRA mortgage-backed securitizations. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Packaging+CRA+loans+into+securities.-a020804893 -- So I take it this had nothing to with Bear Stearns' problems? no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   14:01:07 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #47. To: no gnu taxes (#45) So I take it this had nothing to with Bear Stearns' problems? Bear Stearns failed because of the increased margin requirements that were put on it by its counterparties because its private label ALT-A mortgages began to default and Bear Stearns could no longer meet its obligations and guarantees to both its funds and its correspondents. So the answer is correct, they had nothing to do with it. war  posted on  2011-06-10   14:04:24 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #48. To: war (#47) So it all boils down to the GSEs role under the CRA. Gotcha --- By the end of 2008, Fannie and Freddie held or guaranteed approximately 10 million subprime and Alt-A mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)—risky loans with a total principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, accounting for both their 2008 insolvency and their growing losses today. Since 2008, under government control, the two agencies have continued to buy dicey mortgages in order to stabilize housing prices. There is more to this ugly situation. New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A. In general, a subprime mortgage refers to the credit of the borrower. A FICO score of less than 660 is the dividing line between prime and subprime, but Fannie and Freddie were reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. Fannie has admitted this in a third-quarter 10-Q report in 2008. An Alt-A mortgage is one in which the quality of the mortgage or the underwriting was deficient; it might lack adequate documentation, have a low or no down payment, or in some other way be more likely than a prime mortgage to default. Fannie and Freddie were also reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. It is easy to see how this misrepresentation was a principal cause of the financial crisis. Market observers, rating agencies and investors were unaware of the number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages infecting the financial system in late 2006 and early 2007. Of the 26 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding in 2008, 10 million were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, 5.2 million by other government agencies, and 1.4 million were on the books of the four largest U.S. banks. In addition, about 7.7 million subprime and Alt-A housing loans were in mortgage pools supporting MBS issued by Wall Street banks—which had long before been driven out of the prime market by Fannie and Freddie's government-backed, low-cost funding. The vast majority of these MBS were rated AAA, because the rating agencies' models assumed that the losses that are incurred by subprime and Alt-A loans would be within the historical range for the number of high-risk loans known to be outstanding. But because of Fannie and Freddie's mislabeling, there were millions more high-risk loans outstanding. That meant default rates as well as the actual losses after foreclosure were going to be outside all prior experience. When these rates began to show up early in 2007, it was apparent something was seriously wrong with assumptions on which AAA ratings had been based. Losses, it was now certain, would invade the AAA tranches of the mortgage-backed securities outstanding. Investors, having lost confidence in the ratings, fled the MBS market and ultimately the market for all asset-backed securities. They have not yet returned. By the end of 2007, the MBS market collapsed entirely. Assets once carried at par on financial institutions' balance sheets could not be sold except at distress prices. This raised questions about the stability and even the solvency of most of the world's largest financial institutions. The first major victim was Bear Stearns, the smallest of the five major Wall Street investment banks but one invested heavily in risky MBS. The government rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 signaled that the U.S. government, and perhaps others, would stand behind other large financial institutions. The moral hazard this engendered was deadly when Lehman Brothers' solvency came under challenge. Spreads in the credit default swap market for Lehman, despite massive short-selling, showed very little alarm by investors until just before the fateful weekend of Sept. 13 and 14, when they blew out on fears that the firm might not be rescued. no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   14:24:04 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #54. To: no gnu taxes, war (#48) I don't think anyone would dispute the role of sub-prime lending in the mortgage meltdown, however as it has been painstakingly explained to you several times, these riskier loans were not made under the auspices of CRA. Furthermore the entire CRA loan program was such a small portion of the overall mortgage market that it is absurd to conclude that CRA had anything to do with the meltdown. There is an argument to be made that the GSEs loosened lending standards to help minority borrowers, and that the big banks were complicit in as much as they outsourced their due diligence to predatory mortgage brokers who conned uninformed borrowers to mistate their financial circumstances in order to qualify for loans they had no realistic ability to pay back. Sometimes these mortgage brokers were a subsidiary of the company which built the new homes and offered special financing packages on the inflated sale price. The mortgage rating agencies also played a role by failing to perform their fiduciary responsibility to properly rate the risk of these loans. The list of bad characters who participated in the real estate boom and bust is endless. The overarching theme in this tragedy is the FAILURE of market forces in a deregulated environment to work as advertised to prevent the financial meltdown. The obvious solution would be to reenact the strict regulations that prevented this type of crisis for over sixty years, which is exactly why a cabal of conservative bloggers first conspired to create the smear that CRA was to blame. Thunderbird  posted on  2011-06-10   21:13:28 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #55. To: Thunderbird (#54) Furthermore the entire CRA loan program was such a small portion Weren’t the majority of the subprime loans made by mortgage service companies not subject to the CRA? This is true. But it is largely beside the point. A huge driver of the demand for subprime loans was the demand for CRA bonds. Banks operating under the CRA could meet their obligations by buying up CRA loans or MBS built from CRA loans. The CRA created a demand that the mortgage servicers were meeting. What's more, many smaller mortage service companies hoped to be acquired by larger banks. Increasing their CRA lending made them more attractive take-over targets. A study put out by the Treasury Department in 2000 found that the CRA was encouraging the mortgage servicers to provide loans to low-income borrowers, in part because the CRA loans had been so successful. Finally, the Clinton adminstration threatened to subject the mortgage companies to the CRA if they didn't comply voluntarily. They promptly agreed to increase their CRA-type lending in order to escape the kind of public scrutiny that comes with official CRA regulated status. no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-10   21:28:03 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #114. To: no gnu taxes (#55) Weren’t the majority of the subprime loans made by mortgage service companies not subject to the CRA? I think you have a fundemental misunderstanding of the Community Reinvestment Act program which is property location specific, and the subprime and Alt-A lending programs which were borrower specific. The CRA program was developed in the 1970s to counter the previous bank practice of 'red-lining', which essentially cordoned off poor neighborhoods from access to capital. The purpose of CRA was to reverse that practice by giving lenders an incentive to lend money into those previous red-lined areas. From its inception until the present day the CRA program has never had any other criteria for eligibility than the location of the property being purchased, with all other lending standards remaining the same. Traditionally, the GSEs (fannie, freddie, ginnie) provided liquidity to the lenders by becoming a secondary market for mortgages. The GSEs maintained standards for which loans they would accept, and these standards became the defacto ones for the industry. In 1999 a deal was struck between the Republicans in Congress and the Clinton Administration that essentially tore down the wall of seperation between the commercial depository banks and Wall St. investment houses. The quid pro quo given to Clinton was agreement to loosen up lending standards to boost minority home ownership. For banks this was an easy trade-off since removing the commerical/investment firewall allowed them to increase in size, while the risk of loosening lending standards was passed along to the GSEs which were becoming increasingly filled with political appointments. The Bush administration carried on and maintained regulatory control over this financial house of cards until it started to collapse in 2007. There is lots of blame to go around on all sides of this issue, including the failure of every market oriented control that we were told would prevent such a meltdown from occurring. If you ask any of the 'players' today what one thing would put a halt to the ongoing problems in the financial industry they will invariably tell you that it would be the reinstatement of the Glass-Seagal act, or its modern day equivalent the Volker Plan . The mere fact that both Democrats, Republicans and Wall St. hate the idea is reason enough to demand it be reenacted. Thunderbird  posted on  2011-06-11   13:24:30 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #116. To: Thunderbird (#114) I think you have a fundemental misunderstanding of the Community Reinvestment Act program which is property location specific, and the subprime and Alt-A lending programs which were borrower specific. Come on, really. Don't you think politics tied the two together? no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-11   13:39:52 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #123. To: no gnu taxes (#116) Come on, really. Don't you think politics tied the two together? No, CRA was crafted to specifically avoid the problems that sub-prime borrowing created. There is no correlation between CRA and subprime lending. Subprime lending arose because the borrower neutral CRA wasn't getting the job done for the folks in DC who wanted more minority borrowing. The minorities on the receiving end wanted to get out of the poor areas they traditionally were confined to, and were willing to pay extra for the opportunity to do so. Thunderbird  posted on  2011-06-11   14:20:05 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #127. To: Thunderbird (#123) There was no subprime lending problem before the ENFORCMENT of the CRA in the mid 90s. no gnu taxes  posted on  2011-06-11   17:14:33 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   Replies to Comment # 127. #129. To: no gnu taxes (#127) There was no subprime lending problem before the ENFORCMENT of the CRA in the mid 90s. Yea so? There was no sub prime lending problem prior to the repeal of Glass Steagall either. Nor was their a sub-prime problem until HUD relieved banks of all sense of due diligence in 2003 and thus allowed FN and FM to purchase "liar loans" in unprecedented amounts. war  posted on  2011-06-11 18:22:33 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   End Trace Mode for Comment # 127. Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest

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