Hidden In Plain Sight

This author was on the Mark Levin Show.  He documents how the stock market crash of 2008 was caused by all those bad mortgages that the federal government (Democrat Bill Clinton and his Secretary of HUD - Mario Coumo - in particular) forced banks to underwrite for poor people.  When thousands of people defaulted on their payments, the housing bubble created by the government came crashing down.   The Democrats in Congress and their media lap dogs portrayed it as the fault of Wall Street that was left holding the bags of worthless mortgages and had to be bailed out.   

The resulting Dodd-Frank Bill with its Consumer Protection Bureau is making the recovery slow and painful for banks and small business.

What is shocking is that Obama’s HUD is now doing the same thing and forcing banks to take on sub-prime loans to poor people.

Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World's Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again

Peter Wallison (Author)

The 2008 financial crisis—like the Great Depression—was a world-historical event. What caused it will be debated for years, if not generations. The conventional narrative is that the financial crisis was caused by Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation of the financial system. That narrative produced the Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive financial-system regulation since the New Deal. There is evidence, however, that the Dodd-Frank Act has slowed the recovery from the recession. If insufficient regulation caused the financial crisis, then the Dodd-Frank Act will never be modified or repealed; proponents will argue that doing so will cause another crisis.

A competing narrative about what caused the financial crisis has received little attention. This view, which is accepted by almost all Republicans in Congress and most conservatives, contends that the crisis was caused by government housing policies. This book extensively documents this view. For example, it shows that in June 2008, before the crisis, 56 percent of all US mortgages were subprime or otherwise low-quality. Of these, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When these mortgages defaulted in 2007 and 2008, they drove down housing prices and weakened banks and other mortgage holders, causing the crisis.

After this book is published, no one will be able to claim that the financial crisis was caused by insufficient regulation, or defend Dodd-Frank, without coming to terms with the data this book contains.

…the Democrat-led panel buried key data proving that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies pushed the housing market over the subprime cliff. In 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her California pal Phil Angelides, a long-time Democrat operative, to lead the commission.
• Angelides buried evidence revealing that by 2008, three in four high-risk mortgages wound up on the books of HUD-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration. A data-rich memo by former Fannie Mae chief credit officer Ed Pinto proved that government, not the private sector, drove risky lending. But Pinto's research "was never formally made available by the chair or staff to the other members of the FCIC," Wallison writes.
Fannie and Freddie, now under full federal control, are back making low down payment loans to low-income borrowers, and the Dodd-Frank-mandated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is forcing banks to ignore credit risks in the name of affordable housing.
A corrupt investigation led to corrupt reforms.

Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/012215-735877-whistleblower-reveals-pelosi-covered-up-government-role-in-housing-crisis.htm#ixzz3PflTJ3sc …