I repeat myself:  I will readlily offer up that George W. Bush did too little to stop the momentum of the subprime housing market and in fact helped to foster it.  But my point is that this started not with Reagan (no serious history of the issue holds to that!  Ridiculous point…), but clearly started with Clinton. You misunderstand the CRA history.  Yes, when Carter signed it into law in 1978 it was designed to stop the practice of “red-lining” in poor mostly urban areas.  And it stayed essentially that way throughout Carter, Reagan, and the HW Bush years and even most of Clinton’s first term.  Then in 1995 the CRA was given a new mandate-via executive order of Bill Clinton bypassing congress-to require banks to now give certain percentages of what can only be called risky loans and prove that they did so or these banks would be subject to lawsuit if they chose to expand in a specific territory.   The game quickly became one of strange bedfellows: When a bank tried to expand into other busines in a particular city or state, they were frequently hit with lawsuits from community action groups such as ACORN claiming they had not served enough of the poor.  As crazy as that sounds, it is a well documented phenomenon.   ACORN and other groups like NACA in Boston, etc, would work inside a poor community and approach the working poor and help to get them a loan-very often that they could not afford initially or maintain- as long as they met certain requirements.  Usually those requirements would mean registering to vote and training in community action within the organizaation.  Then they helped to essentially broker loans with the banks-or they would sue the banks for subjectively not making enough loans in the areas traditionally seen as behind the “red-line”.  The banks could fiscally bear this because they were able to dump the bad loans off their balance sheet by selling it to Fannie and Freddie who by the end of the 1990′s under Jim Johnson had changed the rules by lobbying those in congress who were charged with oversight of Fannie and Freddie.  Fan and Fred then packaged up the loans and sold them again to Wall Street as Mortgage Backed Securities, which of course grew to gargantuan proportions. When Wall Street went south, both parties tried to distance themselves from the brokerage houses, but the fingerprints of BOTH parties are there-and that CLEARLY includes Democrats.  Dems were involved heavily with Jim Johnson at Fannie as well with most of his money funneling to the left.   The housing bubble grew from this start and became intertwined in both parties and was fostered by many factors including the cheap money made available by banks to many middle class Americans who bought too much house, or those who bought and flipped.  These are not hidden items, many articles and books support this history and the housing bubble was well described as early as 2000.

As the housing bubble grew, many individuals pushed this agenda.  It should be noted that politics is more than the Presidency as there existed divided congresses during many of these years. Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Andrew Cuomo, Henry Cisneros, Hank Paulsen and Ben Bernanke-amongst others-all helped foster this during the Bush and Clinton years-as did Bush and Clinton!   Trying to lay this entirely at the feet of Bush is factually incorrect and dishonest.  Liberal agenda was strongly in play from the beginning and much money was made on the left and the right.   I am done with your blather.

BofA settled a civil claim that it had lied when they “sold”
mortgages advertised as meeting government standards. We all know by now
that the loans “lacked documentation and underwriting.” But what is
still to come out is WHY they lacked documentation and WHY the loans
lacked underwriting.

The documentation was absent simply to hide the fact that the bank
was pretending to have ownership or an insurable interest in the loans
and mortgage bonds. The true transaction was between the
investor/lenders and the homeowner/borrowers. BofA stole or misused the
identities of both the lender and the borrowers so that it could sell
the loans many times under guise of exotic derivative instruments called
mortgage backed bonds.

If fully documented, the lender would have shown up as the investors,
which is as it should have been. BofA never put up a dime for the
funding or acquisition of any of the loans. Its claim of ownership and
an insurable interest was a blatant lie, inasmuch as they actually had
no risk of loss, which is why there was no underwriting standards
applied either.

I would suggest you track the pleadings of this U.S. Attorney and
pick up some pointers along the way. He is definitely on the right
track. As for now, the focus is on the bad mortgage bonds, bad loans,
and lack of documentation up at the lender level.

Once that veil is penetrated it will be revealed that the borrower
was defrauded using the same misdirected documentation using appraisal
fraud as the principal leverage point.

But the real stuff is going to hit the fan as more and more people
realize that this standard practice in the industry allegedly to
“protect” the investors, invalidated the chain of title and there has
been no effort to correct the problem. When it is revealed that the
investors were cheated out of their money by a use of proceeds that
crosses the borders of fraud, and that the terms of the bonds were never
intended to be satisfied, just as the terms of the loan were never
meant to be satisfied or secured, then we will have justice peeking its
head out over the mess.

In the end, legally, there will be privity or a relationship only
between the investor/lenders and the borrowers and that there
transaction was supposed to be documented and recorded. Instead the
banks documented and recorded a different transaction in which the
intermediaries looked like the principals and were therefore able to do
“proprietary trading” in which they took investor money from one pocket
and put it into another.

That is what opened the door to huge “profits” (actually theft
proceeds) on the way up and on the way down. These banks are now buying
the same houses from themselves (using another affiliate entity) and
then reporting the results to the investors so they can write off the
loss. They are going to be the largest landowners in history as a result
of this PONZI scheme.

Here is an explanation even a right winger can understand.

A bookie really likes a horse. He believes he is going to make a
killing
because “it’s a sure thing” … “the horse can’t lose” .The bookie
takes
EIGHT HUNDRED TIMES as many bets on this horse as he can cover
because he is
gonna make a killing and because after all, “the horse can’t lose”
… but ooops, the horse loses and he can’t pay off. They break
the bookies
arms and legs and put him in a dumpster. Who is to blame, the
bookie who
foolishly leveraged himself beyond reason,  OR “the horse”?

Those who are blaming the CRA or sub-prime loans for this economy
are
in effect, “blaming the horse” for losing, rather than the bookie
who took
many times as many bets as he could cover …. and THAT, my
friends, is
how ONE TRILLION bucks worth of sub-prime mortgages became EIGHT
HUNDRED
TRILLION dollars worth of debt thanks to Reaganomics and
Republican Phil Gramm’s
legislation which allowed an excessive degree of leverage and
eliminated the
need for capital reserve requirements so that banks who acted like
bookies
could “cover their own damn bets”.

I will add that a vast majority of sub-prime loans were made between 2001 and 2006 when the Real Estate market began tanking and you remember who was president during those years …. don’t you Ken? You might also wish to look at Bush’s 200 million dollar American Dream Down Payment Act which he signed in 2003, (Clinton my ass)  Applauding Congress for authorizing the annual $200 million down payment
assistance program, Bush and Housing and Urban Development Acting Secretary Alphonso
Jackson said the initiative will also help meet the Administration’s “Home ownership
Challenge” to increase minority home ownership by 5.5 million families by
the end of the decade.This was “free money”, a grant not a loan that paid the closing costs of home buyers without repayment.

The “housing bubble” triggered the Wall Street led melt down but it is not the reason or the “cause” for the melt down itself. Because of fraudulent securitization schemes which broke existing law from the beginning of the loan to the ffraudulent foreclosure of the home, every hundred thousand dollars of loan was parlayed into a million bucks worth of worthless derivatives by Wall St, gambling markers which currently comprise a 700 trillion dollar derivatives market which sit like a cancer on the books of every major bank. Republican deregulation is “the reason”. There was just over a trillion dollars worth of sub prime loans total so if that was what crashed the economy one trillion bucks would have fixed the economy but we know Wall Street stole ten times that.

BofA settled a civil claim that it had lied when they “sold”
mortgages advertised as meeting government standards. We all know by now
that the loans “lacked documentation and underwriting.” But what is
still to come out is WHY they lacked documentation and WHY the loans
lacked underwriting.

The documentation was absent simply to hide the fact that the bank
was pretending to have ownership or an insurable interest in the loans
and mortgage bonds. The true transaction was between the
investor/lenders and the homeowner/borrowers. BofA stole or misused the
identities of both the lender and the borrowers so that it could sell
the loans many times under guise of exotic derivative instruments called
mortgage backed bonds.

If fully documented, the lender would have shown up as the investors,
which is as it should have been. BofA never put up a dime for the
funding or acquisition of any of the loans. Its claim of ownership and
an insurable interest was a blatant lie, inasmuch as they actually had
no risk of loss, which is why there was no underwriting standards
applied either.

But the real stuff is going to hit the fan as more and more people
realize that this standard practice in the industry allegedly to
“protect” the investors, invalidated the chain of title and there has
been no effort to correct the problem. When it is revealed that the
investors were cheated out of their money by a use of proceeds that
crosses the borders of fraud, and that the terms of the bonds were never
intended to be satisfied, just as the terms of the loan were never
meant to be satisfied or secured, then we will have justice peeking its
head out over the mess.

In the end, legally, there will be privity or a relationship only
between the investor/lenders and the borrowers and that there
transaction was supposed to be documented and recorded. Instead the
banks documented and recorded a different transaction in which the
intermediaries looked like the principals and were therefore able to do
“proprietary trading” in which they took investor money from one pocket
and put it into another. That is what opened the door to huge “profits” (actually theft
proceeds) on the way up and on the way down. These banks are now buying
the same houses from themselves (using another affiliate entity) and
then reporting the results to the investors so they can write off the
loss. They are going to be the largest landowners in history as a result
of this PONZI scheme.
If the housing bubble alone and sub prime loans had crashed the economyHere is an explanation even a right winger can understand.

A bookie really likes a horse. He believes he is going to make a killing because “it’s a sure thing” … “the horse can’t lose”.The bookie takes EIGHT HUNDRED TIMES as many bets on this horse as he can cover because he is gonna make a killing and because after all, “the horse can’t lose” … but ooops, the horse loses and he can’t pay off.They break the bookies arms and legs and put him in a dumpster. Who is to blame, the bookie who foolishly leveraged himself beyond reason OR “the horse”?

Those who are blaming the CRA or sub-prime loans for this economy are in effect, “blaming the horse” for losing rather than the bookie who took many times as many bets as he could cover …. and THAT, my friends, is how ONE
TRILLION bucks worth of sub-prime mortgages became EIGHT HUNDRED TRILLION dollars worth of debt thanks to Reaganomics and Republican Phil Gramm’s legislation which allowed that unregulated degree of leverage and eliminated the need for capital reserve requirements to “cover your own damn
bets”. Next time you hear Limbaugh spreading that manure about Jimmy Carter and the Community Reinvestment Act, you will know he (and Ken for that matter) are ignorant.

 Democrats started this ball rolling with Clinton’s executive act to give Carter’s 1978 Community Reinvestment Act teeth.  Clinton essentially heavily regulated the home loan industry by forcing that quotas of bad loans be given out by any bank receiving FDIC coverage….or be sued if it tried to do any expansion otherwise.  He was heavily aided by HUD secretaries Cisneros and then Cuomo who enforced it using local community action groups like ACORN and the NACA to sue banks on “behalf” of the CRA and the government!   It created an artificial housing  bubble well into the $ Trillions by 2000 before Bush even took office. (Obama got involved with this as a young lawyer in Chicago BTW!)  Fannie and Freddie were then buying up the loans and got political cover largely from the black congressional caucus and Barney Frank and other Democrats on the House Housing Committee.  They essentially looked the other way as money flowed into their campaign coffers from Fannie and Freddie (talk about incest! GSEs bought-off the govenrment oversight!)  And then, Fannie and Freddie sold the bad loans off to Wall Street re-packaged asMortgaged backed securities-a.k.a. “derivatives”.  Along come the 2000′s and the housing bubble is already being decried in some financial circles as a problem… Democrats cheered Bush on when his policies supported their way; and loved to pin the blame on him when those same policies failed! Look, I’m no fan of Bush, but Barney Frank is on record (Kudlow 2010), as admitting that the he and others in congress and the GSEs were largely to blame for the Housing Bubble and the subsequent Meltdown.  Democrats have their fingerprints all over this as the instigators going back to 1995.  Republicans are like the dumb kids who got caught because they crashed the other fraternity’s keg-party when the cops showed up.  They may not have started the party, but they got drunk from the same tap….Bush sure did,Liberals love to decry the Republican party for what is essentially a straw man- “all regulation is bad”.  Conservatives don’t think that as a rule, never did….Some regulation is a fact of life, but harmful, aggressive government regulation and/or intervention is exactly what caused the damn problem in the first place!  It’s just that in this case, regulation came from the RINOs and Democrats calling for heavy-handed pushing of bad loans and they set up a regulated system to do their bidding.   Re-regulation after de-regulation caused the S&L collapse in the 90′s, and government intervention caused the housing bubble thereafter.  Maybe, the historical evidence suggests that governments should not overly interfere with markets and regulations should stop at solid consumer protections instead of crony capitalism and political agendas?In this case in particular, given the specific history of the housing bubble and the subsequent meltown, Democrats  calling for more regulation is like a career criminal calling for a police escort.As to your hate comments: Ironically, it is always the Democrats who call for spilling blood of their loyal opposition as though Republicans weren’t even fellow countrymen!  It is reprehensipble and wrong.  I consider myself a conservative far more than I identify as a Republican, and while I disagree with my liberal friends, I do not call for their euthanasia or their blood.  Liberals, who speak of gun control, made erroneous death threats after the Tucson shootings in 2011.  They frequently call for women’s rights with anger and conviction but ignore the rights of millions of unborn babies each year.  They generally want smaller defense budgets but as of late, they sell M-1 tanks and F-16 jets to radical Islamists who do not claim to be our friends and are on record as wanting to destroy Israel and threaten Americans, burning our flag in from of our embasssy.  They complain about Gitmo under Bush, but look the other way at Gitmo under Obama, they complain about waterboarding three people but cheered when UBL was killed and Obama took full credit.  They look the other way when Obama’s drones kill innocent “collateral damage” known as innocent women and children but cry foul over everything W ever did…Obama is on record as being one of the most duplicitous men to ever occupy the White House, and all we ever hear about is “Bush lied”  Do you know how many Democrats in congess supported the Iraq war with virtually the same intelligence reports as Bush? Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to name two amongst a majority.  Double Standards?  And as you call for euthanizing your fellow Americans who disagree with you even when your own party’s policies are as much or more to blame for the problems we face.Two things:  1) You don’t occupy the moral high-ground when you threaten people and you support double standards via your ignorance. 2)  We are all in this thing together.  

i think the average house should never be more than a $ 100000 or it basicley desighned to make you a slave for the banks.

these price are desighned keep you oweing for your whole life .

it should not take more than 10 years to pay off your house .
that 30 year loan crap you will never have nice vacation, you will be a slave for ever until you die