Commanders Post at The Warpath - View Single Post - Housing Mess Started With Bill Clinton In 1999

djnemo65 · 09-26-2008, 06:28 PM

Anyway First, as someone who worked in the mortgage industry I can tell you that the claims made in that article are idiotic and borderline racist. As tech stocks cooled and September 11th threatened to puncture what had been a roaring American economy, the FED reduced interest rates to encourage investment in real estate, which was already a hot market. Programs like ARMS which had existed for a while exploded in popularity as housing prices began to appreciate at 20 percent or more per year. With equity piling up in homes people began to borrow against the value of their properties, assuming the free ride would go on forever. While they were of course wrong, the reversal of the housing market would have been a contained crisis if it wasn't for the reckless investment of Wall Street firms in collaterilzed debt packages: fantastically profitable, Wall St. kept watching the money come in, assuming the housing market would not regress, as there was no historical precedence for this in America. They were wrong, and what should have been a limited crisis in the US housing market punctured the entire global economy.

This is a complicated thing. It is not any one person's fault. You could of course blame Bush's "Ownership Society" which created tax incentives for buying over renting, further accelerating investment in the over-heated housing market. You could certainly blame the commitment to deregulation which reduced oversights that might have prevented so much Wall St. capital getting tangled up in murky debt packages. But to say that the increased minority homeownership which occurred under Clinton, which removed the racist barriers that had prevented minorities from owning homes at a rate equal to whites for like hundreds of years, was anything other than a good thing, is complete fucking bullshit. Seriously, bullshit. Racist fucking bullshit. I am furious right now that you would post this crap and I want to hear you defend the claims made by your author - with evidence, not partisan sloganeering.

09-26-2008, 06:28 PM	#5
djnemo65 Playmaker Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 2,836	Re: Housing Mess Started With Bill Clinton In 1999 Anyway First, as someone who worked in the mortgage industry I can tell you that the claims made in that article are idiotic and borderline racist. As tech stocks cooled and September 11th threatened to puncture what had been a roaring American economy, the FED reduced interest rates to encourage investment in real estate, which was already a hot market. Programs like ARMS which had existed for a while exploded in popularity as housing prices began to appreciate at 20 percent or more per year. With equity piling up in homes people began to borrow against the value of their properties, assuming the free ride would go on forever. While they were of course wrong, the reversal of the housing market would have been a contained crisis if it wasn't for the reckless investment of Wall Street firms in collaterilzed debt packages: fantastically profitable, Wall St. kept watching the money come in, assuming the housing market would not regress, as there was no historical precedence for this in America. They were wrong, and what should have been a limited crisis in the US housing market punctured the entire global economy. This is a complicated thing. It is not any one person's fault. You could of course blame Bush's "Ownership Society" which created tax incentives for buying over renting, further accelerating investment in the over-heated housing market. You could certainly blame the commitment to deregulation which reduced oversights that might have prevented so much Wall St. capital getting tangled up in murky debt packages. But to say that the increased minority homeownership which occurred under Clinton, which removed the racist barriers that had prevented minorities from owning homes at a rate equal to whites for like hundreds of years, was anything other than a good thing, is complete fucking bullshit. Seriously, bullshit. Racist fucking bullshit. I am furious right now that you would post this crap and I want to hear you defend the claims made by your author - with evidence, not partisan sloganeering.