BAILOUT: Yes or No?

[Koga No Goshi]

And the dems control congress and can't pass the bailout. But when that happens, you call it a bipartisan failure.

It is. The Republicans are almost ALL against it. And a lot of the Dems are. This is a very unpopular bill, what do you want? You are operating on a total double standard, you say you are not for the bailout, but then you want to declare a Democratic failure to pass one. If you don't want the bailout, then not passing it is a victory. Simple as that.

I'm not saying the FNMA collapse was brought on by too much regulation. I'm saying there was too little.

No, you keep repeating that the only reason any of this happened was the government "forcing" home loans for people who couldn't afford them, purportedly as part of some pet project to help minorities or poor people that only the Dems espoused. Even though, as already pointed out, both parties have been part of the "Ownership society", with our current Republican President being quite enthusiastic for it.

It was the GSEs that got special privileges and bonuses from the government. They bought up sub prime loans, which encouraged banks to give those loans which encouraged more people to buy homes, which increased the price of homes. This has little to do with late 1990s deregulation.

Dude. Do you even KNOW anyone who works in finance? Ask anyone why these banks wanted to give out subprime loans. They didn't need "encouraging" from anyone. Commission fees, and very nice commissions for the loan agents who brokered them. This became the financial equivalent of used car salesmanship. Everyone, BANKS INCLUDED, believed the housing market was continuing upwards for a very long time. So they didn't worry (and the law did not require them to worry, or even do basic checking on loan applicant information) because by the time subprime borrowers got crunched, their housing value "should" have increased to the point where they could either a) sell at a profit and get out of the loan b) take equity out for more on hand cash.

Fannie and Freddi enabled this, and they are not private companies. And that's without mentioning their accounting scandals.

Freddie and Fannie were not private? You just pulled a Sarah Palin.

As for blaming political parties, perhaps I've been a bit soft on the GOP. But they never had 60+ in the Senate, and democrats were against this regulations because it meant regulating a GSE instead of a private firm. And the GOP failed getting all sorts of other legislature conservatives wanted passed. So it was not pure GOP aversion to regulating Fannie and Freddie that stopped regulations in '04 and '05.

I'm sorry, but with that post you seem to be piling on the democrat talking points.

CR

If you "don't want to get into the blame game", then stop making every other post a little snippet about how this is all the Democrats. And the Dems don't have 60+ in the Senate either, and you have been more than happy to heap blame on the "Democratic Congress" for not fixing an economic and political trend of laissez faire Christmas Day for Investor Class capitalism that has been going back to Reagan in a couple of months. Oh, and don't even give me a "they didn't have a big enough majority to pass things they wanted to" excuse for the Republican Congress, which changed the rules of the House and Senate and threatened the nuclear option left and right. So if you don't want a fight about whose party sat in power for years and either enabled, or advocated, and put their stamp on, A LOT if not most of the policies hurting us at the moment from Iraq to the economy, then stop starting one.