How can America afford to pay for Medicare for all?

@Picklebobble2 Forcing banks to take on risky housing loans was not such a good idea, eh. Got any more brilliant ideas?

@sunsporter1649 Nobody FORCED them to do that !
It was a stupid business decision.

@sunsporter1649 No one forced them to take on risky loans. They were required to stop red lining entire communities and neighborhoods for no justifiable reasons without even doing a risk analysis. And as they are wont to do, they went overboard to the opposite extreme in a rush to gobble up market share by eliminating all risk assessments. It was on them. But then they knew their politicians would come riding to the rescue with further subsidies.

@dancingtongue Politicians are the most venal animals on the planet. Everybody has known that for centuries.
And if the public are guilty of anything it's falling for the blustre EVERYTIME they SWEAR it'll never happen AGAIN.

And yet, here we are again.

@Picklebobble2 It's like so much today: nobody holds them accountable and God knows they don't feel any sense of self accountability whatsoever.

@dancingtongue Thanks for confirming my thesis, any more brilliant ideas?

@sunsporter1649 So you agree that the banks weren't forced to start handing out junk mortgages.

@dancingtongueHans Bader • 08/31/2011

The Wall Street Journal today writes about how the Obama administration is repeating the “mistakes of the past by intimidating banks into lending to minority borrowers at below-market rates in the name of combating discrimination.” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has argued that bankers who don’t make as many loans to blacks as whites (because they make lending decisions based on traditional lending criteria like credit scores, which tend to be higher among white applicants than black applicants) are engaged in a “form of discrimination and bigotry” as serious as “cross-burning.” Perez has compared bankers to “Klansmen,” and extracted settlements from banks “setting aside prime-rate mortgages for low-income blacks and Hispanics with blemished credit,” treating welfare “as valid income in mortgage applications” and providing “favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit,” notes Investors Business Daily.

@sunsporter1649 And none of that was based on redlining entire neighborhoods and communities based solely on racial/ethnic demographics?

@dancingtongue Seems like the banks were correct, and you bleeding heart liberal nut jobs ended up costing hardworking taxpayers billions. Any more brilliant ideas?

@sunsporter1649 We wanted individuals graded on their individual credit ratings, not on arbitrary red lining of whole neighborhoods and communities based on race/ethnicity. That is not what the banks did. The flipped to the opposite extreme and started handing out mortgages like M & Ms at Halloween.

@dancingtongue The banks accused of “racism” by the Obama administration include banks that were previously praised by non-political government agencies for their success in minority outreach and lending to minorities in regions in which they did business. For example, the Obama administration is suing Cardinal Financial Corp., even though “the FDIC in the past gave kudos to Cardinal for its lending practices. Justice is now accusing Cardinal of failing to open branches and achieve racial loan quotas in counties that its federal regulator never before contended should be the focus of its lending,” arguing that it was not enough for the bank to make loans to minority applicants who applied for loans, and that it had an affirmative duty to open new branches in heavily-black areas it had never done business in before.

The Obama administration’s demands suggest it learned nothing from the financial crisis, which was caused partly by “diversity” mandates and affordable housing mandates that encouraged lending to people with bad credit scores who later defaulted on their loans. Banks were under great pressure from liberal lawmakers to make loans to low-income and minority borrowers. For example, “a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers,” The New York Times noted. As The Washington Examiner noted, the government also “encouraged riskier mortgage lending by minimizing the role of credit histories in lending decisions, loosening required debt-to-equity ratios to allow borrowers to make small or even no down payments at all, and encouraging lenders the use of floating or adjustable interest-rate mortgages, including those with low ‘teasers.’” The liberal Village Voice previously chronicled how Clinton administration housing secretary Andrew Cuomo helped spawn the mortgage crisis through his pressure on lenders to promote affordable housing and diversity. “Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.”

Financial analysts at major investment banks have recently recognized that these government mandates played a bigger role in the financial crisis than previously thought. Former financial executive Ed Pinto has chronicled how the government promoted the risky non-traditional mortgages that defaulted in huge numbers. A recent book co-authored by The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson chronicles how federally-promoted lower lending standards spawned the financial crisis, and put minority borrowers into homes they could not afford.