White House Fires Back at Times Over Housing Meltdown Story
The White House is pushing back hard against a New York Times article that essentially blamed President Bush for the sub-prime mortgage mess and the Wall Street collapse by linking those crises to a policy goal he stated more than six years ago.
In fact, the Times' article ignored a wealth of its own reporting, dating back to the era of Bill Clinton, whom the article mentioned only once, in passing.
For example, in September 1999, the Times noted that, "Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits."
The 1999 piece went even further:
"In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times," the Times noted presciently. "But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's."
Likewise, the Times made no mention over the weekend of President Clinton's aggressive deregulation of the financial services industry, which empowered banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies to engage in some of the very practices -- such as credit default swaps -- that contributed most to the current fiscal crisis.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008...eltdown-story/
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