Maybe we should all chip in and buy Bloomberg an FDL membership.
If he read David regularly, he could spare himself similar embarrassments in the future.

It hardly needs to be said that he’s drinking the Kool-aid. Congress said that mortgage lenders can’t make a loan to a person on street/neighborhood X but refuse to make the same loan to person on street/neighborhood Y (red lining). No one ever told the banks they had to make garbage loans, the banks found them to be profitable because of securitization and the “originate to sell” model of mortgage origination. So, banks looked the other way (or actively promoted) when their agents made 100% loans to borrowers with terrible credit.

Bloomberg knows this.

Another reason I do not like this guy – from the continuation of all of Guiliani’s policies, to coercing the MTA to give away $1billion in land to his buddies, to forcing through the development of the new arena in Brooklyn (near my home, grrrr), to the Republican National Convention, to the Olympic bid, to a back-room deal to get him a fourth term, to claiming the OWS protesters were costing jobs, to this example of willing intellectual ignorance.

Republicans, and Wall Streeters like Bloomberg, will never get tired of blaming poor people and Democrats for the mortgage crisis. They want to rewrite history.

How terribly interesting that Congress can FORCE Fannie, Freddie, and the Banks to make loans certain to lose money from 2004-2008, but the same Congress is absolutely powerless to FORCE those same institutions to renegotiate those same bad loans because they will lose money. How much profit did the banks realize during those money losing years? How is it conscionable for any lender to escalate interest from 6% to 12% overnight even in the best of financial times? Why can’t those 12% loans be lowered to 5% for the current under-water home owner instead of being sold to the next buyer at 1/2 the sales price at that same 5% interest rate? What exactly is the (scam) reasoning behind this criminal process? Is there ever, in the minds of financial gurus, any reason for Congress to impose fairness on lenders?

WTF is this guy thinking/drinking? Oecume, you hit the nail on the head! The banks encouraged the independent mortgage brokers to lend anything to anybody (which they were more than happy to do for the fees), securitized those loans with the right hand and took those same vehicles short on the left hand (a la G & S). Like the Duke brothers in Trading Places: “Tell him the good part, Randall”!!! Win or lose, the banks won. Even when THEY lost!

Actually, this is a good thing. When somebody as financially successful as His Honor comes out spouting this garbage, it’s obvious those in power want us looking the other way and are nervouse we’re not. Real subtle, Mikey!

Maybe for the wrong reasons, but Bloomberg is correct.

Congress could have reined in Wall Street at any time. It didn’t. But it did reward Wall Street by bailing it out, no strings attached, and in the process condoned Wall Street’s behavior.

When you allow a plutocrat to use his billions to buy a lofty public office for himself, what do you expect from this “public” official hence made anything but the views and perceptions of plutocrats? The agendas of plutocrats?

Arguing against Bloomberg’s ideas or positions is stupid: you’re arguing with a very wealthy man that his huge sense of wealthy entitlement is off-base, ultimately.

Argue instead that the election system that allows Bloombergs to buy themselves public offices is either egregiously ill-advised, or egregiously injust, or simply illegitimate as a representative system, or all three together.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s Robin Leach.

Bloomberg is a lying putz that has his fingerprints all over the housing bubble. This is a guy who actively encouraged inventive lending and all sorts of creative loans to put people in houses they couldn’t afford.

He can try to rewrite history all he likes, that won’t make it true.

Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t gave gotten them without that.

So because “a lot” of people that were on the “cusp” that still have homes, it was their fault. This guy contradicted himself in the same sentence without even a comma. Is a comma before a contradiction to much to ask?

It wasn’t the folks on the cusp, it was the banksters creating a “financial product” that let them off the hook for a mortgage, and then told the crooked mortgage brokers, go forth and sell.

Bloomberg is engaging in fingerpointing 101. He ought to pay attention to where his other fingers are pointing.

“I hear your complaints, Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.

nothing to see here, move along, it was all your fault not the people who stole from you, nothing to see at all, move along

When the economy appeared to be doing well from 2003-2007, Kudlow & Co declared “The Bush Boom” was under way. Jerry Bowyers even published a book titled “The Bush Boom: How a misunderestimated president fixed a broken economy.” The DOW hit 14,000 because Bush cut taxes and got out of the way of the market. Housing prices were going to rise forever and there was no bubble.

Now that the Bush boom became a bust, they want to blame Jimmy Carter and Barney Frank. Too bad they can’t go back and call it the Jimmy Carter/Barney Frank Boom.

It’s also funny that Fannie spent millions lobbying Washington. Were they lobbying Congress to force them to lend money to poor people? Don’t think so. They were lobbying for lax enforcement so they could compete with Wall Street and make a quick buck for their shareholders.

Yeah, Blame the Government run by the banks that perpetuated the foreclosure fraud and did nothing, but actually condoned it. What a ridiculous merry go round of logic. The onepercent are the best at it.

Only in some weird alternate banking reality is the banking professional less culpable than the individual who comes to a banking professional asking for a loan.

Folks like Jamie Dimon should have been out on their ass. “In hindsight it probably wasn’t a good idea to loan people money without documentation” indeed!

Don’t know if Congress could have reined in Wall Street when the SEC was refusing to enforce the laws that were on the book. Recall a 2003 photo op in which banking regulators posed with a chainsaw in front of a 9000 page stack of regulations wrapped in red tape. Those laws were not repealed. The regulators simply ignored them.

Who cares what Bloomberg says? We all know he is a self-serving one-percenter.

Congress could have stopped it, but didn’t. Worse, Congress bailed them out with no strings attached. To this day Congress turns a blind eye while Obama’s enforcement agencies do everything but hold Wall Street accountable.

Who deserves your ire?

The SEC exists at the mercy of Congress.

Don’t confuse what Congress can do with what Congress will do.

Bloomberg wants to offload responsibility to Congress for the crisis so that nobody gets any funny ideas about holding banks accountable.

Sounds remarkably like Barry’s re-election strategy.

Democrats are every bit as much to blame as Republicans. It was Clinton who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagal, after all.

Certainly the Democrats have sold out those who work, time, and time again

Congress certainly had a role in goosing the mortgage meltdown and to deny this is wrong. Why, Barney Frank’s own boyfriend has his fingerprints all over many of the toxic loan programs that Fannie Mae created and which contributed to the mess.

Looks like Barney was deeply responsible for blowing taxpayers’ money.

Back in the 1950s and even in the 1960s even republicans argued that home ownership was the “foundation” of America and that home ownership (working class private property) was what separated us from and made us superior to the collectivist “communist” nations like the USSR. I guess that with the “end of the cold war” the political aristocracy decided that they didn’t really need universal home ownership as a symbolic antidote to “collectivist” ideology or “external” economic threats.

Mayor Bloomberg was heavily involved with the marketing of Solomon the digital trading platform program. This played a major part in the economic collapse scenario, the split second trades have complicated things to the point that the titles of the bundled mortgages are caught up in the MERS program which did not keep up with the rapidity of the passage between buyers and sellers, and has left the ownership of the houses that are being foreclosed upon up in the air, and has made millions of people miserable because they lost their homes due to lax judges who acted in sympathy with the banks, and now, the investigation into the tax evasion etc and lack of proper documentation is coming up against the Obama Administration’s desire to pander to Wall Street, except when President Obama is claiming to be one of the 99 percent. The Mayor of New York is deeply implicated in the economic crisis and it’s cause, and he is letting the cat out of the bag with his speeches. Loose lips sink ships.

Wow, that rambling post managed to get every buzzword in one paragraph. Other than SARS, little green men, and solar flares.

Do you have any idea what you’re saying?

How you equate program trading with MERS and tax evasion is beyond me.

Irregardless all sensible people can agree that program trading needs regulation and oversight. It is yet another bag of tricks that big investment banks have that allow them to manipulate and game the stock markets.

So what? Bloomberg has as much to do with program trading as your PC has to do with the New York Stock Exchange.

Mayor Bloomberg, is that you?

Exactly correct.

And, BTW have any of you actually used a Bloomberg Machine?

They’re fabulous, and a must have on all the trading desks on Wall Street.

We had one years ago when I worked at Merrill Lynch, and you literally had to elbow your way onto the thing.

They are particularly good at providing up to the minute pricing of the steaming, heaping piles of dung given AAA ratings by Moody’s, S&P and the like.

So, Mr. Mayor, your hands are hardly clean here either.

What a f@cking dope, or Liar. Did the government make Countrywide, Ameriquest, New Century, etc, etc, lure people into subprime loans — forging documents, committing fraud, and hiding fees? Or did they do that themselves to get rich? And sell the garbage as securitized “AAA” loans they had no liability for? What an idiot.

Well said, David.

I hate it when the GOP lie and blame The Community Reinvestment Act of F&F rather than the investment banks and the non-Regulation by Greenspan’s Fed of those investment banks.

By the way – the ” The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977″
was somehow stuck in my memory as being passed in 1979 – proving once again my wife is right to check everything I say :-)

I have enough ire to go around. I don’t need Congress to tell me not to engage in poor behavior because I’m not a sociopath. Apparently the banking industry is full of sociopaths unable to know right from wrong without Congress legislating it for them.

This burlesque routine explains the real origin of the financial crisis:

http://youtu.be/tCgaDz2ABRQ

I’m so fracking confused – WTF is there to ‘debate’ with these lying thieving pigs?

THE DEBATE that enables all this bullshit comes from the anti-anger anti-strident crowd – the people who think that by giving more honey to lying stealing pigs you’re gonna persuade them to stop kicking the shit outta you –

IF we are calling lying thieving pigs what they are, and putting them in the figurative public stocks they belong in,

they might knock the bullshit off.

at the least, NO ONE would hire them or listen to them or give them the time of day

rmm.

so Alan Greenhead never had anything to do with ginning up the housing market? Benny the bum did not sit on his butt while the being told the housing market will crash? W never talked about the ownership society? The GOP never talked up using your home for retirement cash?

Robert the Rube never took money from Sandy McPeak? Bubba never Deregulated the banks? Phil the gramm cracker never brokered the that Bubba signed?

sadly SOME people do believe this crap

Yes, I distinctly DO NOT remember Congress putting a gun to Wall St’s head and FORCING THEM to make shitty deals aat any time in the last forty years.

Funny, that, I do remember Paulson effectively putting a gun to Congress’s head and threatening the world ending if Congress didn’t bail out Wall St in 2008.

Somebody needs to tell Bloomberg he’s going fucking bat shit insane. It’ll cost him at least double to buy his next term in office if he keeps up these insane lies.

Here is that picture along with an explanation of the deregulations.

In the summer of 2003, leaders of the four federal agencies that oversee the banking industry gathered to highlight the Bush administration’s commitment to reducing regulation. They posed for photographers behind a stack of papers wrapped in red tape. The others held garden shears. Gilleran … hefted a chain saw.
This photo from 2003 shows two regulators: John Reich (then Vice Chairman of the FDIC and later at the OTS) and James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision (with the chainsaw) and representatives of three banker trade associations: James McLaughlin of the American Bankers Association, Harry Doherty of America’s Community Bankers, and Ken Guenther of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Eliot Spitzer was refusing to back down over the issue of state v. fed regulation of bankers when he was surveilled with a call girl if I remember correctly.

“In 2003, the OCC proposed regulations to preempt virtually all state banking and financial services laws for national banks and their diverse range of non-bank, corporate operating subsidiaries. Despite opposition from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the OCC’s regulations went into effect. In Watters v. Wachovia Bank, N.A. in 2007 the United States Supreme Court validated the preemption of state regulations by the OCC, ruling that the OCC, not the states, has the authority to subject national banks to “general supervision” and “oversight”:

…State regulators cannot interfere with the business of banking by subjecting national banks or their OCC-licensed operating subsidiaries to multiple audits and surveillance under rival oversight regimes