For you hardcore "republicans are evil" types....
Read the article, then read the date on the by-line:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
"The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under ( Read more... )
1) The bill would have given the Fed more power over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But what would the Fed have done with this power? The correct answer of what to do to a struggling firm is to shrink its activities and wind it down slowly until it is back on stable footing.
However, there is no way in hell that the Bush administration would have done that. The housing crash had already started. To start winding down operations would have made the issue even worse. It would have been the correct course of action, get the pain over before it gets worse, but the Bush administration's actions in general this entire time have been to prop up the institutions. Do you really think that they would have excercised that power in a way that would have increased the number of foreclosures?
2) The bill would have raised the limit on the size of the loans they were allowed to handle. Uh oh. Look back at number 1. That would have allowed the problem to get WORSE, not better.
Based on what I see, the only thing that would have come out of that bill would have been to postpone the crash until 2009, and have it hit us even harder than it did today.
So I don't buy it. There is no way Bush would have taken the heat for doing what needed to be done.
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