I don't spin. That was the name of the article.

Now, you claim the following: "...the evidence is fast mounting that it was the lending institutions, brokerage houses, along with the appraisal firms that artificially inflated the price of properties in a complex game of "lets bet on whether we can recoup our investments before the bottom falls out".

Prove it. Lenders were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
If they didn't lend, the Obama's of the world would cry "racism"!

When they do lend, they are accused of taking advantage of people who are too stupid to understand what they are signing.

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Barack Obama is the personification of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The Perverse Worship of a man

I read the article, but I'm still not buying it. You are trying to tie Obama into this lending scheme, which is a stretch at best, and clearly politically motivated on your part, but your underlying premise is that banks were pressured into doing this. I just don't buy that. For one thing, not all banks were doing this. For another thing, the minority borrowers with bad credit scores were being offered expensive, risky subprime mortgages at twice the rate of whites as recently as last year, despite the borrowers clearly not qualifying for the loans, according to Reuters. This was NOT motivated by pressure from liberal politicians, but by greed. I tried to find a source that you would find credible. The most right-wing source I found was the Heritage Foundation. Their article laid the blame on mortgage lenders:

(http://www.heritage.org/Research/Economy/wm1881.cfm)
"Despite the risk associated with these subprime mortgages, many mortgage lenders further relaxed their underwriting standards and in the process introduced even more risk into the system, some of it motivated by fraud and misrepresentation." Nowhere in the article does it mention political pressure from liberal Democrats.

My last point is that this was going on at the height of power of a Republican administration and Republican Congress. How is it that banks were "pressured" by liberal Democrats during that period to do something this foolish? Where was the administration while this was going on?

The answer of course is that the administration had about as much oversight of the economy as they did over the disaster recovery after Katrina and the progress of the war in Iraq. Asleep at the wheel.

Hummmm if we were all liberal- and only MSNBC and CNN were the only stations - the world would be a better place.

Then they did away with Fox because they don't agree with them.

Well, I thought we lived in the land of the free- as of now I think Fox is staying. Sorry guys, we all have our opinions- not all of us are liberals - and agree with you.

BTW I don't find MSNBC or CNN being fair to conservatives, that is why I choose not to watch them. You don't have to watch Fox. It's great to live in the land of the free.

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We Will Stand

We were talking about sub-prime loans, and you insert a totally unrelated, random post about Fox vs. MSNBC and CNN. Ironically, if you had actually read my post and thought about it for a moment, you would have noticed that I went to some effort to find a right-wing website to quote, and Beaver actually came up with an unbiased report of his own.

So why insert your point here? It seems random.

You intentionally left off the first part of the paragraph from the link that you posted, which states:

"These problems had their origin in the mid-1990s when mortgage lenders reduced the previously strict financial qualifications needed to acquire a mortgage to buy a house by offering credit-impaired households mortgage loans, albeit at higher interest rates to compensate for the greater risk."

Hmmm... mid-1990's, who was POTUS in the mid-1990's? Why, none other than "Slick Willie" Clinton - the "first black president".

Here's a better article with a timeline on the whole mess.

Politicians’ homeowner goals aided loan mess

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Barack Obama is the personification of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The Perverse Worship of a man

for once I have to admit, you posted an article that even-handedly examined the entire mess, from top to bottom. Oh, that Fox would practice such "fair and balanced" coverage. As for the blame (and I am not sure that playing the blame-game is really going to be productive at this point) your article pretty much indicts BOTH parties equally. If you must place blame, go back to bank-deregulation which,of course, had its roots in the Reagan administration.

Now I have got one for you to mull over...what is your solution to the problem?...let's wave the magic wand and put YOU in charge of fixing the mess...what you YOU do? Keep the faith.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

The point is someone bringing up Fox and acting like they don't practice fair and balanced coverage. That's the point. If you don't like Fox don't watch it. Could it be someone knocking Fox because they are a little conservative?

Have a nice day.

______________________________
We Will Stand

Beaver, I intentionally left off MOST of the article, but I included a link so everybody could read the entire article. I did not spin the article. There was no mention of pressure from liberal politicians, or any politicians for that matter.

Anybody who is interested in the sub-prime mortgage mess can Google "sub-prime mortgage" and read a variety of unbiased articles on the subject from websites such as Forbes and Reuters. The motivation was greed, not left-wing politics.

Beaver, I didn't read your second article until this AM, but Yardman's right--it looks like an unbiased report that spreads the blame around fairly. There's certainly enough blame to go around.

This gets back to a question I posed to Maximus a couple of weeks ago--how much regulation is optimal? We all want a free economy, but the absence of sufficient regulation tends to encourage fraud and abuse. As Maximus said, it's not necessarily that we need more laws, just better enforcement of the existing laws and regulations.