The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which was the landmark deregulation bill that most economists credit with bringing about this crisis - was Republican sponsored, past by a Republican congress.
Just what bills ' supporting these destructive policies' were enacted that caused this financial debacle? You said in an earlier post "The reason why the investment banking firms failed was because congress legislated a change to mark to market pricing on thinly traded assets." As I've pointed out to you, there is no such legislation nor did the accounting rule changes force market valuations on thinly traded assets.
Love those Fox 'middle' of the road videos,lol. Regarding congressional attempts to regulate Fannie Mae. First, They interview the guy from the American Enterprise Institute, telling how the legislation would have prevented the crisis.
Ironically, the AEI opposed the bill -
AEI - Short Publications - H.R. 1461: A GSE "Reform" That Is Worse than Current Law
In fact, the bill was not brought to the senate floor because republican leadership made a deal with Fannie Mae - lend more to bolster a weak economy and we'll leave you alone. Although it's in fashion now to blame the Dems, this is the real reason republicans dropped the bill. The weakest economic recovery in modern history was supported almost entirely by these sub-prime loans and the housing bubble, killing them would have been political suicide for whoever was in power.
Video#3 - still cracks me up. The white house supposedly wanted to reign in Fannie Mae as did the Republicans in congress and yet barney frank(who btw I think is an incompetent jerk) stopped them all.
No one wanted to reign in fannie mae, they were just practicing CYA and to believe otherwise is just kidding yourself. In fact the administration wanted a clause in the bill to REMOVE the president's authority to appoint members to Fannie's board. The only plausible explanation for this is that when problems occurred, the president wouldn't be blamed.
In addition, McCain and 16 other Republican Senators voiced their support in a letter for this bill in May 2006 ( yes, a congressional election year), a full 9 months after the bill was effectively dead. Senate Bill S190, look it up.
Yep, congress is at fault but before you absolve the Bush administration, Let's talk about the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In 2004 29 states had laws on the books or were in the process of passing laws to reign in predatory lending practices, a sub prime issue directly leading to mortgage defaults. They did this because of the lack of federal action on the problem. The OCC ruled states were not allowed to do this, effectively removing all barriers to sub prime lending going bonkers.The result? From 2004-2006 sub-prime lending exploded from 9% of mortgage lending to 21%.
This was a Bush administration action, not congressional.
I eagerly await the information on what bills the democratic congresses wrote that led to this debacle.
As I've said before, everyone is to blame. Your choice to blame democrats is not based on fact but on partisan assumptions. All we will do is recreate the problems of the past when partisan idealogies control the logic portion of our brains.