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"Video: Bush's first attack on traditional credit standards to Increase Minority Homeownership, June 17, 2002"

44 Comments -

1 – 44 of 44
Blogger nooffensebut said...

Off topic:

I recommend The Act of Killing as a provocative racial documentary about Indonesia in 1965.

10/27/13, 12:44 AM

Anonymous Anononymous said...

"One of the barriers to homeownership is the inability to make a downpayment."

Were half way there. The second biggest barrier is the inability to make the monthly mortgage payments.

10/27/13, 1:41 AM

Anonymous Anononymous said...

When someone rents, the money goes to some middle class person who owns a few houses. When someone is paying off a mortgage, the money goes to the banks. Total interest paid is greater than the cost of the house.

10/27/13, 1:57 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What's even crazier is that if you really dig into the internet's dusty sub-basement you realize that Clinton was the guy who really started this stuff, and that Bush was just afraid of looking bad in comparison...

1999 LA Times article about the titanic yet vastly under-reported success of Clinton's minority homeownership efforts:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.impeach.clinton/9Sau_Kitvac

Clinton's ten-year $2 trillion campaign to finance minority homeownership:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.politics.libertarian/3dFpdI7Uy-A

10/27/13, 2:15 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Clinton was restrained by fear of Republicans. Bush wasn't restrained by anybody.

10/27/13, 2:29 AM

Anonymous Cail Corishev said...

It's kind of amazing how Bush's post-911 military adventures erased the previous perception of him as a "compassionate conservative" (liberal Republican). He's now portrayed as some kind of angry warmonger, but I still remember how he was praised during the campaign for getting along with Democrats in Texas, and how he buddied up with Ted Kennedy immediately after the inauguration. His goals were all liberal big-government utopianism: NCLB, amnesty for illegals, AIDS education in Africa, etc. If his desire to bring democracy to benighted brown people hadn't led him to war, those would have been his legacies.

Bush had as much faith in the benevolence of big government as any Democrat; but a Democrat, handed this speech, would have sent it back to have some of the more blatant yay-for-socialism wording toned down.

10/27/13, 2:49 AM

Anonymous Bert said...

One of the biggest lies that got spread during the Bush years was the idea that Karl Rove is some kind of political genius.

10/27/13, 2:54 AM

Blogger Fabian Saulinsky said...

I really don't remember Clinton getting any Rep pushback for his minority homeownership drive, suing banks, etc.

It seemed like a team effort, driven by the hard academic Left(as usual) with Reps all too happy to continue the project since Clinton made it a big bragging point in '99-2000 and there was no forseeable downside...

10/27/13, 3:11 AM

Blogger Shouting Thomas said...

We are angry now at Bush for his part in this disaster, but he was trying to do good.

He was such a sincere man. I have no doubt that he was trying to do good.

It is astounding what damage we can do when we think we are doing good.

10/27/13, 3:21 AM

Anonymous eah said...

And so that's why I propose and urge Congress to fully fund the American Dream Downpayment Fund. This will use money, taxpayers' money to help a qualified, low income buyer make a downpayment.

My emphasis.

That's all you need to know to confirm the guy is fucking scum, and in on way 'conservative'. It's not enough that "taxpayers", including hard-done-by renters, help massively to finance home ownership via the mortgage deduction; here he wants them to ante up for down payments. Disgusting.

10/27/13, 3:44 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's also pretty easy to see the political appeal - this was an attempt to export the Affordable Family Formation that made Republicans successful in Texas.

10/27/13, 4:33 AM

Anonymous Art Deco said...

Manipulating people into making inadvisable business decisions is bad business, but what you are referring to is a modest fraction of the overall trouble in housing markets. The prevalence of owner occupied housing only went from about 65% to about 68% of the population and the elevated delinquency rates of subprime borrowers (17% v. 6-7% for prime borrowers) might have accounted for about a quarter of the overall problem of delinquency in mortgage lending generally, and not all subprime borrowers are racial minorities.

Also, the point in time when housing prices detached themselves from nominal incomes was around 1997, at least in the metropolitan centers covered by the Case-Shiller 10 city index. It is a bit rum to blame either federal reserve policy followed during the period running from the fall of 2002 to the fall of 2004 or the Bush Administration initiatives in 2002 for this problem. It was a bubble. Bubbles happen in markets without state intervention.

10/27/13, 5:05 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Art Deco:

In economics, the margins matter.

A lot.

10/27/13, 5:35 AM

Anonymous dearieme said...

Since you guys fired Bush the Elder, you've had three adolescents as President. There's a price to pay for that.

10/27/13, 5:52 AM

Anonymous Dave Pinsen said...

Bush's compassion played a role in the wars too. Another leader would have wrapped up Afghanistan 10+ years ago. Once the Taliban were deposed and Al Qaeda flushed out, he would have left it to northern alliance warlords and gotten out of dodge. Bush's compassion insisted on planting democracy and women's suffrage there, and NATO and the UN bought in because who could disagree with that?

10/27/13, 7:57 AM

Anonymous Dave Pinsen said...

There probably would have been a real estate bubble either way, but the minority mortgage crusade may have made it bigger or more distorted.

Former Aussie PM Paul Keating blamed the global financial crisis, of which or bubble was a part, on Tim Geithner's actions during the Asian currency crisis ten years earlier: Geithner to blame.

10/27/13, 8:19 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuvKDMWHIFU#t=644

Add #t=644 to the end of the youtube link and the video will start at the 644 seconds mark.

10/27/13, 8:25 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Easy credit is a key driver in most bubbles, because strict credit standards pop or prevent bubbles almost automatically.

The role of easy credit can be seen in the bubble which paralleled the housing bubble, that of commercial real estate and private equity take-out valuations from 2002-2007, when nobody was saying that Sam Zell or Leon Black needed a special invitation into the ownership society.

The stock market bubble of 1997 to 2001 is a bit of an outlier. Rates were generally rising through the time, we didn't see margin loans to buy shares get significantly easier, and the only big corporate borrowers who were part of the bubble got their loans not from loose standards but from fraud (Worldcom, Enron). My operating theory is that the amount of actual cash that had to flow into the market to create the bubble was comparatively modest, and the macro economy was able to generate just about that much cash. Best example: government of Singapore gets scared of Thailand due to the 97 crash, takes $5 million from that market and puts it with a VC in California. That $5 million is put into a startup, which in turn spends it on $1 million in services each from five recent IPOd tech companies. These companies are being valued at 20x revenues so that $5 million generates $100 million in increased market cap, with maybe $10 million more of new dollars actually flowing into trades as the market moves up. The market sees this enthusiasm and permits the startup to IPO itself at a $500 million valuation, but only $25 million in actual stock is sold. Thus $40 million of enthusiastic cash creates $600 million in market valuation.

10/27/13, 8:55 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It goes further back than 2005. I recall that in 1992 or so the Boston Federal Reserve put out a report that minorities were not getting mortgages yadda yadda yadda. I recall sending a letter to the editor of my local fishwrapper saying that they were promoting home loans in neighborhoods where they would not put coin machines for the newspaper. Uh.. they did not print the letter.

10/27/13, 8:58 AM

Anonymous Mike said...

I always thought one of the genius moves the Clinton administration made was to loosen lending standards. They did it in every program the government touches: SBA, Farm Loans, Export/Import, Fannie, Freddie, and others I don't even know the names of... This was genius in the sense of getting a lot of political gain at little apparent cost.

Bush, and Rove, saw the success of that policy and doubled down. But the Bush admin also was schizophrenic in that they also tried to rein in Freddie and Fannie. I was a member of the Homebuilder's Association during one of the efforts to scale back the two F's. I quit the organization as I couldn't support unfettered growth in those to "companies."

The loosening of lending standards probably began during the Truman administration, some of it justified. But like all good things, there comes a point when there is too much. The lending environment of 2002 to 2006 was stupid crazy. I will admit to making a killing on a RE deal using a NINJA loan. I will also admit that I was lucky to get out on top. Most of my deals haven't worked out so well.

There are a myriad of pieces of evidence that lead to the 2008 meltdown. We all can assign our own weights as to importance. My particular whipping horse would be the transformation of the large banks and investment houses from partnerships to public corporations. None of this would have happened if the owners of those banks had personal joint and several liability. You could have all the innovations of the past thirty years, securitization, CDO's, CMO's, etc., as long as the guys behind all of them stood to lose their wealth.

Our awful politics won't even allow for new and possibly better regulation. It's always about punishing the other side. Oh, and soliciting campaign contributions. Can't forget the campaign contributions.

10/27/13, 9:32 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Appease the leftist power establishment with programs like this and give the yahoos a ferrin war to wave the flag over while their country and civilization is being destroyed, pretty much the Republican program for the last 50 years. "Watch what we do, not what we say." Cha-ching.

10/27/13, 9:32 AM

Anonymous Mike said...

A recap of the Bush admin trying to rein in the two F's

NB: The author is one of those elusive conservative Hispanics.

10/27/13, 10:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I am not yet convinced there is a housing bubble." - Tyler Cowen, April 18, 2005

10/27/13, 10:31 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

And of course that outreach resulted in Bush II getting 11% of the black vote instead of the usual Republican 10%.

Hell of a job, Bushie.

10/27/13, 10:34 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

And who gives a fuck that Bush was "trying to do good"?

Who ever thought that letting people buy $500,000 with zero down payment was "doing good" except the rip-off artists at WaMu and people in the real estate industry.

Great work Steve.

10/27/13, 10:40 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'll admit to being taken in. I too once believed that owning a home was a result of middle class behavior. I remember Jack Kemp championing ownership and pushing programs to privatize public housing because owners take care of their property. And as noted above, we had some success in Texas in the 90s. I also contributed my time to Habitat, which I consider, at least in DFW to be one of the most effective charities I've ever seen. So that's my excuse.

Ownership is the outcome of middle class behavior, not the cause.

10/27/13, 10:48 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

Art Deco said...

Manipulating people into making inadvisable business decisions is bad business, but what you are referring to is a modest fraction of the overall trouble in housing markets. The prevalence of owner occupied housing only went from about 65% to about 68% of the population....."

There is a flaw in your assertion. As home ownership (or perhaps I should say "ownership") had been holding steady at about 65% for a long time, that indicates that the pool of responsible mortgage holders was saturated. That increase - that last, marginal 3% - probably represents an unusually large number of bad credit risks. That last 3% may well have caused nearly ALL of the problem.

10/27/13, 11:25 AM

Blogger Power Child said...

I think there's a book to be written or a documentary to be made here.

10/27/13, 11:29 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's also pretty easy to see the political appeal - this was an attempt to export the Affordable Family Formation that made Republicans successful in Texas.
Yeah, but it wasn't going to worked in the Sand states and even Texas now is closer to the national average. To make housing cheaper go to Mobile Homes.
The waves of illegals, the first wave is before Reagan legalized everyone it was when the Assembly jobs in La for electric firms were done by illegal Mexican women and Asian immigrants like Vietnam to keep wages not as high if native born did it. The second wave in the 1990's is when the illegal immigrants were employed heavily in service and the garment industry particularly in LA.. The Third wave is construction illegal men are needed. The Fourth wave some construction and warehousing with the rise of e-commerce. Granted, the e-commerce is requiring some word processing skills and speaking English.

10/27/13, 12:06 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Clinton was restrained by fear of Republicans. Bush wasn't restrained by anybody.
Good point, in fact in California only the Bay Area was real high in pricing once Bush came in you went from 250,000 to near 700,000 in Los Angeles. Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Florida prices doubled or tripled up. In fact most of these states problem is the housing bubble that goes thru cycles to deinflate it and reinflate it. On this you tube, Bush doesn't seem the devil but naive that people who were getting the loans would be educated enough to avoid the sharks.

10/27/13, 12:25 PM

Anonymous countenance said...

Democrats can't believe their enemy would wage war on down payments and documentation in the name of equality for minorities.

I think they believe and see it, because I'm sure they agreed with it. But they (mostly successfully, so it seems) found a way to blame the negative consequences on Bush without letting him get credit for the "positive consequences" (i.e. positive in an ephemeral sense for their own non-white voting base).

10/27/13, 12:39 PM

Anonymous Matthew said...

"Three-quarters of white America owns their homes. Less than 50 percent of African Americans are part of the homeownership in America. And less than 50 percent of the Hispanics who live here in this country own their home."

"White America"
"African Americans"
"Hispanics who live here"

See what he did there?

Bush made no distinction with government handouts between citizens and non-citizens; between those living here legally and those who weren't. His housing bubble - his housing cancerous tumor, we should call it - depended on the illegal as much as the legal.

The man was a dick. It's really up to conservatives who understand this to spread the message to Republicans who still make excuses for the douchebag.

10/27/13, 2:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anyways, Bush pushed Hispanic peak to 2006 and birth rates to 2008 or so. In fact the housing boom might have brought in at least 2 million more than if there was not a housing boom.
Currently I think the schemes of both the left and right to legalized people are so far apart like the gang of eight versus Darrell Isaiah or someone else that their disagreement on guest workers or border security might postpone it. The Chamber of Commerce however is mad at this and even more mad at the shutdown, they promise non-Tea party Republicans who might support a plan.

10/27/13, 3:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't help but have a soft spot for W, probably because:

(1) He clearly believed this stuff, and

(2) Unlike Obama, he's not sharp enough to have a coherently subversive worldview or devious agenda, and

(3) He's disliked for all the wrong reasons. He's portrayed as some kind of arch-conservative domestically and internationally, when he was nothing of the sort.

He probably would have gotten away with his hammy feel-goodery had he presided over the 90s holiday-from-history-and-economics decade.

As it is, he and his brother would do well to stay out of public life indefinitely.

10/27/13, 3:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, Bush was elected by the Tea Party bunch who now are mad at his spending but many of them against illegal immigration never learn. One had a screening of the Film they Came to America. The people endorsing it were Sean Hannity who is so pro Republican he still liked Rubio. The other was Mike Hukabee who allowed the Mexican consulate to rent free when he was governor. The right never learns that the people they support are just jerks that use them and might vote against a legalization but still want cheap labor.

10/27/13, 3:54 PM

Anonymous Bert said...

Republicans got so damn smug during 2003-2007 that watching them crash and burn was such a wonderful thing to see. Those people really deserved everything they got.

To make matters worse, they paved the way for Obama.

10/27/13, 4:05 PM

Anonymous Bert said...

"(1) He clearly believed this stuff, and"

I don't think Bush "really believed" in anything. He did whatever Cheney and his handlers told him to do. Never once did I get the feeling he really cared about being President. He's best compared to Benjamin Harrison, an empty suit who served simply to enable Republicans in Congress to make money.

"(3) He's disliked for all the wrong reasons. He's portrayed as some kind of arch-conservative domestically and internationally, when he was nothing of the sort."

Maybe not, but he's disliked for plenty of good reasons. Internationally he made an ass of himself in the run-up to Iraq, alienating France, Germany, and anyone else while taking Britain for granted and using economic threats to force Eastern European countries to join in. Elsewhere he demonized Russia, undermined Russian influence in the former USSR, and destabilized India by supporting Pakistan in everything it did. And let's not forget how he reacted to the election of unfriendly governments in Latin America.

Domestically, he was a failure. He used the corrupt Tom DeLay and the slavish Bill Frist to push his agenda through Congress while ignoring and suppressing any true conservative who objected. Once they were gone his ability to influence anything disappeared.

10/27/13, 4:22 PM

Blogger Power Child said...

My soft spot for Bush came after watching Alexandra Pelosi's excellent documentary Journeys with George, in which he comes off as quite endearing and magnetic.

10/27/13, 4:54 PM

Anonymous Big Bill said...

"Fannie Mae will establish 100 partnerships with faith-based organizations that will provide home buyer education and help increase homeownership for their congregations. I love the partnership."

Ahh. Yes. I think that is where Acorn came in with their "Acorn Loans" offered by Bank of America.

Apparently the "Faith-based" folks got a cut of the action, a fee for putting on a day-long presentation.

Acorn would sign a certificate saying that Jose or Tyquanisha were now "educated" and could handle a no-money-down mortgage loan.

Since Acorn and the black and Mexican churches got a piece of the action, they were not inclined to raise any questions regarding their followers ability to pay back the loans.

Brilliant bit of palm-greasing. Shovel some blood money at Leftists and they will roll over and play dead.

Sort of like Jesse Jackson and his various shakedowns. Once he has the cash in hand he is your best friend.

And what did the banks care? If they could dump the trash loans on Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, it wasn't their money at risk.

10/27/13, 4:58 PM

Anonymous Matthew said...

"I remember Jack Kemp championing ownership and pushing programs to privatize public housing because owners take care of their property."

And one of Kemp's acolyte's was future Rep. Paul Ryan, who barnstormed California in 1994 opposing Prop. 187, which was the attempt to fight illegal immigration. They lost the vote, but won via judicial theft, and destroyed California as a result.


"I can't help but have a soft spot for W, probably because: (1) He clearly believed this stuff, and...He's disliked for all the wrong reasons. He's portrayed as some kind of arch-conservative domestically and internationally, when he was nothing of the sort."

OK, but how will anyone's understanding of his poltiics change when conservatives defend him? I'm conservative, Bush is not. I make no effort to defend him.

"My soft spot for Bush came after watching Alexandra Pelosi's excellent documentary Journeys with George, in which he comes off as quite endearing and magnetic."

Um, irony alert. The leftist daughter of Nancy Pelosi makes Bush look cuddly, and you take that as a positive sign?

10/27/13, 6:00 PM

Anonymous jody said...

there are millions of videos on youtube from before 2005, but not many GW bush speeches are probably among them, for obvious reasons. who would want to re-live them. terrible speeches, among the worst ever given by a US president. boring. stupid. clumsy. inaccurate. offensive. with laughable delivery.

slowly, over time, videos of G-dub's speeches will trickle onto youtube, like anything else with a very low interest level. they'll have 253 views after 4 years. stuff like that. c-span numbers.

if you want to see what youtube is good at when it comes to presidential speeches, check out this video exposing barack obama's staged audience fainting technique:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGZ4WeQwmIk

snarky videos excoriating haughty targets is de rigueur on there.

10/27/13, 6:40 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Domestically, he was a failure. He used the corrupt Tom DeLay and the slavish Bill Frist to push his agenda through Congress while ignoring and suppressing any true conservative who objected. Once they were gone his ability to influence anything disappeared
Tom Delay was a cheaper labor guy similar to Ted Cruz for the Tea party. Both were involved in third world places, Delay was involved in Saipan and cheap labor of Filipino labor threre and Cruz has investments in Jamaica that were not reported. I'm not a conservative anymore because almost everyone from Delay to Cruz is a crook.

10/27/13, 7:31 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Domestically, he was a failure. He used the corrupt Tom DeLay and the slavish Bill Frist to push his agenda through Congress while ignoring and suppressing any true conservative who objected. Once they were gone his ability to influence anything disappeared
Tom Delay was a cheaper labor guy similar to Ted Cruz for the Tea party. Both were involved in third world places, Delay was involved in Saipan and cheap labor of Filipino labor threre and Cruz has investments in Jamaica that were not reported. I'm not a conservative anymore because almost everyone from Delay to Cruz is a crook.

10/27/13, 7:31 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The people get the government they deserve - Joseph de Maistre

10/30/13, 9:15 AM

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