What’s gotten into the water recently at Newsweek? Even as Time magazine doubles down on the notion that we’re all welfare victims, David Frum awakes from his intellectual slumber of the last four years to note who originally inflated the housing bubble:
As Bill Clinton collects his accolades, let’s recall: the key decisions that inflated the housing bubble of the 2000s – and that laid waste to the US economy in 2008 — were taken under Bill Clinton’s administration: the decision to leave derivative trading unregulated, the decision to allow deposit-taking institutions to engage in proprietary trading, the pressure on banks to relax mortgage lending standards, the decision to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to grow enormously large thanks to the implicit subsidy of the government guarantee of their bonds and borrowing.
If President Obama inherited a mess not of his own making, it should be remembered of whose making the mess was.
That’s not the only mess that began to metastasize on Bill Clinton’s watch, of course.
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