Re: Home ownership rate has fallen FAR more under Obama then any other POTUS
Sorry but that is GOP right wing bull****. Fannie and Freddie Mac have been key to push home ownership up to the levels it is, but the GOP has been against it from the start it seems. So much for the American dream eh?
No those offering "teaser" rates, were the banks and most of these loans did not qualify under Fannie and Freddie. 60+% of all loans given out in 2006 were in the private unsecured (aka non Fannie and Freddie) market.. it was those loans that went crashing first and caused a snowball effect.
If this is your logic, then you would not have 20% home ownership in the US. Now 30k a year and a million dollar home.. that I would agree. However if you need 50k+ income to get a home mortgage on a 250k home.. then you do realize that 50+% of the American households would not qualify right?
Owning a home is part of the American dream. Chances are that you and pretty much every under 40 year old American on these boards would never be able to get a mortgage if it was not for Fannie and Freddie. You would not have the economic means to get even in the door at the bank. If banks were to run the mortage system without an underwriter like Fannie or Freddie, then most Americans would never be able to buy their own home.
Again the problem was in the unsecured private banking loan market, which exploded under Bush 2 and was made possible under Clinton by a GOP run congress. It was the banks, like Washington Mutual, Citi, Bank of America and others that were pushing these crappy loans on people who could never ever get a normal home loan under Fannie or Freddie rules... it was predatory lending based on the idea that housing prices always goes up and you would be able to remortgage when the time comes... well that time never came, and those crappy loans brought down the world economy.
Pete, for the record, I try very hard not to add bull**** to my posts, since there is enough to go around without me adding more. :mrgreen:
Not to get too lengthy - since you are aware of what happened - in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was signed into law by POTUS Jimmy Carter, which forced banks to give risky home loans to people who could not really afford them, under the guise of home ownership for everyone, with Fannie and Freddie guaranteeing they would buy up bad loans.
When banks realized that F & F would buy up almost any subprime mortgage, things started to go downhill. As a result, F & F collapsed in 2008, forcing the Federal government to spend over a trillion dollars on mortgage backed securities.
If you recall, Barney Frank was on the hot seat about this for quite a while, because the Bush administration had often attempted to call his attention to the growing problem, and he did finally admit that he had missed the warning signs of the lenders' descent into insolvency, because he was wearing "ideological blinders." In truth, both government and the banks were at fault for the collapse, IMO, because both inattention and probable greed played large parts in this drama, and that included both political parties, not just the GOP as you indicated in your post.
As an odd side note, we got a home loan in the late 1970s, and my bank wanted all kinds of proof that we both had jobs, that we could afford what we were buying, that we had a large enough down payment, that we were both healthy enough to continue working - almost everything except offering my firstborn child as security! :shock: Banks were much stricter back then, and it's sad that things changed so much that a collapse became inevitable, IMO.
Please do not resume this exchange if/when you return to the thread. 
