Best of the Meltdown Comments

Three comments from Friday's Meltdown post, which described the catastrophic effects of Democratic interference in the banking system, are worth recapping here. First, the brilliance of "Shelly T":

Nope. It definitely was George Bushj's fault. It was 90% the Bush administration's fault -- as he removed regulations and pushed and pushed and pushed banks to loan to people who could not afford it. Look on Bush's whitehouse.gov for speeches from 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and up until last year he was PUSHING banks to loan to people who didn't have good credit. Thank you Mr. Bush. Before him it was Reagonimics. If you want to assign blame BE HONEST. It was so very clearly the Republicans who got us into this mess.

That's the kind of revisionism that's borderline dangerous.


T. Shaw responded to the insanity:

Outstanding.

Shelly T.: Put down that KoolAid!

Today's WSJ has an op-ed by Basil Paterson's kid which makes the only constructive statement re: the economy since the RTC resolved the S&L Crisis in 1990. "THE ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER UNTIL WE ADDRESS THE ROOT PROBLEM." He doesn't know the woot (as Barney F would say) cause and the three indispensable geniuses (Bair, Bernanke, and Geithner) haven't a clue.

Talk about nationalizing (POLITICIZING) banks! What the freaking hell were FNMA/FHLMC/HUD? What about the $2 trillion mortgage backed securities they now own and the $2 trillion in debt they owe on it; and, say, $9 trillion they processed and securitized with indirect implicit US guaranty?

I've been an US bank examiner for 32 years. When the CRA was signed (Obama will replace Carter as THE WORST US PREZ in history) I was a pup. The experienced examiners' reaction was: You can't make banks make bad loans. It snowballed under Clinton.

Every (about 50) merger application I worked on brought in a Community protest from, in NY, Matthew Lee and assorted community agitators. Every one had to be investigated and usually the bank was already making million dollar annual extortion payments to community agitator,er, development groups.

Clinton appointed Ricki Helfer as FDIC Chmn. One of her first acts was to railroad the people investigating White Water/Castle Grande. Another was to start treating insured banks under examination as our clients/stakeholders, and began reducing examiner numbers. Bush's people naturally did it, too. You expected that from small government Republicans.

Think about the $ amounts of subprime loans. How much? Barrons said $825 billion. The gov has already thrown more than that at the problem and the problem is worse. How?

If they'd listened to guys like me, none of this would have happened. But, the politicians had their agenda and the taxpayers and productive, self-supporting people will pay dearly!

Lastly, our pal at Rants & Refinements braved sanity and a new pair of wading boots to visit the fever swamp.

After a chuckle reading Shelly T. early in this thread, I got to wondering about the inner workings of the mind which created such genius thought as to blame both George W. Bush and Reaganomics for the current economic climate, I crossed my fingers and clicked the link to her site:

“Futurism Now: Climate and Energy News From civilianism.com”

Well, it put the mindless rambling of her comment into perspective.

Further down the thread, Dan demands the truth rather than a one-sided argument. Perhaps he is willing to elaborate on which piece of fact in this extensive list is not truthful? Since Dan did not provide a link, I was unable to drink of his Kool-Aid elsewhere in the world to see if his arguments against President Bush were two-sided as he demands of others. My money is on a big fat no.

Similarly to the above, much further down we are treated to another Rhodes Scholar demanding the Fairness Doctrine on this site. A note to this author: if you are going to call people knuckleheads, learn how to spell knucklehead.

More chuckles arise from the notion provided by djcnor that mortgages which failed during Bush’s tenure must be assigned blame to him. Again with fingers crossed, I ventured over to that link to see what sort of person could be simultaneously so naïve and blatantly ignorant. To no surprise, I found an out-of-work teacher. Please, for the sake of our young minds, find work in another field. Additionally, an extensive search of the site for the assignment of blame to President Clinton for the eight major terrorist attacks on our nation during his tenure proved fruitless.

Finally, I had one of those, “aww, isn’t that cute” moments reading this comment which suggests that the problem was created by both Republicans and democrats. In other words: a liberal is forced to concede that their party screwed the pooch, so rather than acknowledge the facts, just blame everyone. Nice try, dolt.

See, reading the comments can be fun!