We have already discussed this Tom....don't make me go get those Senate voting records again....that lending Bill had FULL support from Republicans and Democrats stop blaming Slick Willy for it. Stop repeating this BS.
If we had them you would have remembered that Bill Clinton used over 100 executive orders, none which requires Senate or Congress approval, to put the wheels in motion for the housing debacle.
It was all part of his National Home Ownership policy.
Through executive orders, 10 federal agencies were forced to enforce new "flexible" mortgage underwriting guidelines to boost low-income and minority homeownership.
Banks were ordered to qualify low-income borrowers with spotty credit. The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders eventually abandoned prudent underwriting altogether.
The next year, Clinton, not Senate, not Congress, set quotas for lending in high-risk neighborhoods under an overhauled Community Reinvestment Act, while adding several hundred bank examiners to enforce the tougher CRA rules. Banks that came up short had expansion plans put on hold — a slow death sentence in an era of bank mergers and acquisitions.
For the first time, CRA ratings were made public, allowing ACORN and other inner-city groups, which used the reports to extort banks for $6 trillion in subprime loan set-asides by 2008.
When bankers resisted being saddled with so many risky loans, Clinton, not Senate, Not Congress, tapped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take them off their books, while freeing bankers to originate more of the loans. Clinton, not Senate, not Congress, made the Department of Housing and Urban Development nearly double Fannie's and Freddie's quotas for underwriting "affordable" loans, which remained in force throughout the 2000s.
When the mortgage giants pushed back, complaining that it would be hard to meet the higher targets, Clinton, not Senate, not Congress, pushed them to load up on subprime loans, while authorizing Fannie and Freddie for the first time to buy subprime securities to earn credits toward the HUD goals. The mortgage giants complied to their great detriment.
Clinton, not Senate, not Congress, was also responsible for securitizing these loans which combined bad loans with good loans in packages that were sold to Wall Street institutions, including insurance companies. The mix of these junk loans made it impossible for investors to tell good ones from bad, and the markets eventually seized up and crashed.
Hopefully that refreshes your memory, if in fact we ever discussed it.
