PJ Media

@121. David S: - Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Yes, you sure are sorry. And of course you couldn’t resist… lying. Again. And rather than address the point you couldn’t resist… irrelevant thesis. Again.

The “record” mentioned in the outdated AP propaganda you copy/pasted (again) only goes back to 1880, Zippy. Your cite also fails to mention that the last two years have seen record-setting cold. But I’m sure that doesn’t strike you as the least bit intellectually dishonest.

If you’re going to insist on copy/pasting, maybe you should try using BBC propaganda instead…

Here’s a slightly more honest bit *cough*: “…1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.” [emph. added for Zippy]

Greenland ice core data shows that the global temp. is currently at one of the lowest levels in the last 10,000 years.

@130: Herb: - … please explain to me how the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the recession of 2007-Now.
Why? I haven’t asserted that it caused any such thing. That’s your straw man. There was no recession in 2007, or last year either for that matter. Only as of last month – thanks to the manufactured credit “crisis” and market fears of impending economic damage by a single-party Democrat government – do we find ourselves in a recession. And, historically, not a very severe one as yet.

- please explain how the CRA of 1977 was seemingly NOT a factor in the recessions of 1980, 1991, 2001, and is only now, some thirty years later, affecting us now.
Why? I haven’t asserted that CRA had anything to do with these recessions either way. That’s also your straw man.

You’re confusing recession with the credit sector meltdown. The former was a myth until this last month. The latter was caused by the factors I noted up above.

- Don’t believe everything you hear on AM radio…
Try re-reading what I wrote again – this time for comprehension.

Also, your cherry-picked Bernanke quote is not only riddled with equivocation, but that speech was made before the avalanche of loan defaults, triggered by the Fed’s 17 successive rate hikes (from 6/03 to 6/06) which doubled interest rates in less than three years. Millions of CRA borrowers defaulted because they were unqualified to handle the resulting ARM payment increases – a failure that sane, non-CRA lending rules had previously helped to avoid. This burst the housing bubble (discussed up above in the post you failed to read) and simultaneously turned hundreds of billion$ in foreclosed properties into toxic assets which strained the credit market to the breaking point.

There’s no question that low interest rates coupled with sub-prime lending would have increased real estate prices. This sort of thing happens all the time. Real estate values rise and fall every year due to changes in the rate. But CRA artificially added millions of buyers to a market in which – under lending rules cognizant of normal rate fluctuations – they would not have been qualified to participate. These millions of additional buyers helped push price increases into a genuine, unsustainable bubble. These same underqualified borrowers later defaulted almost en masse due to the precipitous rate increase. Without CRA, defaults would not have occurred at the rate they did and upside-down mortgage-to-value ratios wouldn’t have been nearly as high. These two factors – which provided the breadth and depth of the toxic asset problem – are what devastated the credit sector.

@144. HawkWatcher: In spirit I completely agree with your point.

However, knowing what to do next depends not only on understanding the exact circumstances of the current situation, but how it got that way, so we can avoid repeating any mistakes discovered. It isn’t so much a question of “who” is to blame as much as a question of “what” is the cause.

It’s clear who is to blame – overweening politicians who are not held accountable for their actions.

The “what” is also clear, and has been clear for months now. The problem is that those responsible for that “what” don’t want to start being held accountable because it will cost them political power, not to mention potential jail time. Those in the entrenched media with a vested interest in seeing these same people remain in control aren’t going expose the facts. Rather, they deflect blame onto someone/something else.

This clouds the issues, by design. But the larger problem is that those issues are effectively moot, as Delia correctly points out, because the Democrat Plutocracy is not going to miss this chance to implement everything they’ve been bottling up for the last 8 years. They have a lock on Congress and a ready rubber stamp in the White House. Other than continually publishing the facts that demonstrate why the Democrats’ proposal is dead wrong, what would you suggest we do?