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As recently as his State of the Union address this past January, President Obama wasreaffirming the support he announced last August for bipartisan plans making their way through both chambers of Congress to drastically reduce and/or eliminate the two lending giants’ outsized footprint in the housing market, pressuring lawmakers to “send me legislation that protects taxpayers from footing the bill for a housing crisis ever again, and keeps the dream of homeownership alive” by shifting the market more toward private lending. Opposition to the plan’s practical implications from some highly interested parties in the housing sector, as well as the upcoming midterm elections, have put Congress’s legislative role in the Fannie/Freddie drawdown in fuzzy and protracted territory — so in what will doubtless be the long interim before we see any major Congressional action on that front, the Obama administration is now planning to use their regulatory authority to… ramp up their role in the mortgage market and basically promote more risky lending? What? Via the NYT:

The federal overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Tuesdayannounced a shift in policies intended to maintain the mortgage finance giants’ role in parts of the housing market, spur more home lending and aid distressed homeowners.

“Our overriding objective is to ensure that there is broad liquidity in the housing finance market and to do so in a way that is safe and sound,” Melvin L. Watt, the new head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. …

Mr. Watt’s changes would perpetuate the presence of the two government-sponsored enterprises in mortgage finance, rather than shrinking it. …

Mr. Watt laid out several specific measures. For example, rather than reducing current limits on the size of the loans they guarantee, as previously proposed by the former overseer, Fannie and Freddie would keep the current, relatively loose, limits in place. The two enterprises back about two-thirds of all new mortgages.

The White House, via Jay Carney, applauded “the Federal Housing Finance Agency for issuing certainty and clarity on the rules of the road for loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” on Tuesday, and as Bloomberg notes:

Watt’s policy decisions will play an increasingly pivotal role in the nation’s housing finance system as bipartisan efforts to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appear to be stalling in the Senate.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected to vote Thursday on a measure that would replace the two companies with a reinsurer of mortgage bonds that would suffer losses only after private capital was wiped out. The bill doesn’t have enough Democratic support to advance beyond the committee and legislative efforts to remake Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unlikely to continue before next year.

Well. So much for that, and in the meantime, it looks like the Obama administration just couldn’t resist the urge to keep getting the federal government increasingly involved in the economy.

Read more at:  http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/15/obama-admin-officials-oddly-not-downsizing-fannie-maefreddie-mac-like-they-proposed-to-do/

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History of a Meltdown and the
Upcoming American Coup d'Gras
Fact 1: Today, August 17, 2010, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gave George W. Bush credit for saving the day with his actions watering down the weakened mortgage-guarantee model. Without Bush’s actions, Geithner said, housing prices would have dropped much further and the recession would have been much deeper. What was he talking about? Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the fact that today 90% of all home loans feature federal government involvement . . . and the fact that George Bush tried in January, 2005, and partially succeeded in July, 2007 in undercutting the mortgage-guarantee disaster when a few brave Democrats voted with him. In other words, the whole financial meltdown could have been much, much worse. But how did this problem arise? And more importantly why did it get so very bad?
Fact 2: Back in 1975 only one in every 404 home loans was made with less than 3% down payment. The largest portion of home loans were made with 15%-20% down. At this time America had the highest home ownership in the world, in a given year since 1946, 62-65% of all Americans owned their own homes. The system was definitely NOT broken.
Fact 3: Under Jimmy Carter, CRA ’77 a mortgage-guarantee law that required lenders to make knowingly bad loans was created. Thankfully the law was poorly crafted and easy to get around.
Fact 4: ACORN was also created in Arkansas in 1977 by a lieutenant of George Wiley (Wiley had along with Richard Cloward and Frances Piven of Cloward-Piven Strategy infamy taken eight years to deliberately bankrupt NYC in 1975 and just missed bankrupting NY state . . . their planned for creation of a “National Guaranteed Income” fell through and NYC was bailed out by the federal government. The threesome publicly bragged about their great “accomplishments” and instructed their followers that housing and voter registration should be the next area for “contrived crisis” attack on capitalism and the American way of life) named Wade Rathke. ACORN would continue on in the proud community organizer tradition of Saul Alinsky and Wiley. Cloward, Piven, Alinsky, Wiley and Rathke were all communists. While Cloward and Piven called themselves “socialists,” the rest called themselves either Marxists or Neo-Marxists. Most interesting of all: Rathke not only was key in Bill Clinton's presidential success, he was also the founder of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) the group of thugs whose head Andy Stern has (according to White House logs) spent more time and visited more often than any other guest of the Obamas.
Fact 5: By 1985, 1 in 196 home loans was made with less than 3% down. The system was still solid.
Fact 6: In 1992, President George H. W. Bush failed to veto an expansion os the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 which he detested; this allowed mortgage-guarantee legislation to force Fanny’s and Freddie’s involvement with bad loans. The applicable part of the law was a rider of a much bigger law -- one more reason to keep laws simple and straightforward. Overnight America was in trouble.
Fact 7: In 1993, Bill Clinton signed the Motor Voter Act (called by conservatives “a license for voter fraud”) with Richard Cloward and Frances Piven standing behind him during the signing ceremony the picture in question can be found in several places, including:
Fact 8: In 1995, Barack Obama was working as an ACORN lawyer shaking down home lenders to make extremely bad loans required by these extremely bad CRA laws. Lenders ran through all sorts of gyrations including “local standards” that would prevent such horrendous loans being approved, anything to avoid giving out such high-risk loans. Demonstrations and sit-ins etc. to “shame” the banks were just some of the nice tactics ACORN used. Harassment of bank officials was commonplace.
Fact 9: In 1995, President Bill Clinton cheerfully signed two more expansions of CRA ’77. Some Progressive Republicans joined Progressive Democrats to make this happen.
Fact 10: By 1995, 1 in 7 home loans was made with less than 3% down an expansion of 27 times the amount of “iffy” loans.
Fact 11: In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the steroid version of the CRA ’77 expansions forcing banks, etc. to make very bad loans as a matter of course. Some Progressive Republicans joined Progressive Democrats to make this happen.
Fact 12: ACORN now went into overdrive. People without ID; people without a rental history; people without jobs; people who listed their only income as food stamps; people with abysmal credit ratings; people on welfare; even illegal aliens found home (often very expensive homes) loans guaranteed to them.
Fact 13: The housing market took off. Speculation surrounding everything about the industry ran rampant.
Fact 14: A whole new “derivatives” industry was created on Wall Street, to take advantage of Alan Greenspan’s lax understanding of economics. Greenspan proclaimed in 2002 that the Derivatives were the savior of Wall Street and crashes would now be a thing of the past. Sub-prime mortgages were soon being packaged together as a financial instrument and sold as a derivative.
Fact 15: In November, 2003, a contrarian investment advisor named James Stack through his Investech.com website began warning of a horrific bubble and a sub-prime lending crisis. For 52 weeks a year for the next five years he regularly ran a chart of the “Housing Industry Bubble” and warned of the coming financial disaster.
Fact 16: By 2005, 1 in 3 home loans was made with less than 3% down. At this point 68.5% of Americans now owned their own homes . . . at what cost? At the cost of threatening our very way of life. But ACORN in the southwest now went hogwild in pursuing loans for illegal aliens.
Fact 17: Bush and the Republicans tried to handle the crisis they now saw coming clearly ahead by attacking the ’98 Clinton expansion in January, 2005, along with other CRA ’77 provisions. The Democrats stopped them cold.
Fact 18: Finally in July, 2007, enough patriotic Democrats could see the problem and a watered down version of the Republican attempt from 18 months earlier was passed. It was far too little, far too late, but it did help a bit and that’s what Timothy Geithner was praising today. However, the vast machinery of the five CRA ’77 versions is still in place awaiting the next version of ACORN to put it into action.
Fact 19: ACORN has been in the voter registration business for 33 years now. Recently the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped a voter intimidation suit against four New Black Panthers that had been verbally abusive to White voters at a Philadelphis polling place and threated a Black poll watcher with “beating him to death”. All caught on video. The case had been all but won by the Bush DOJ and handed over to them. After 17 months the case was dropped with only the one Black Panther (the fellow with a nightstick) “punished” by not being able to return to that polling site until November 2012. Obama’s appointee Deputy Attorney General Julie Fernandez presumably responsible for that decision also made two other decisions you should know about. She told a roomful of DOJ employees the DOJ had “no interest in prosecuting cases in which Black perpetrators intimidated Whites at polling places. And she told another roomful of DOJ employees that the department would not be investigating Motor Voter Act infractions at all “because it might lower turnout.” The next step in the grand design begins with voter fraud in the 2010 mid-term elections, count on it.
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
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