Barney Frank, Then and Now. . . What a piece of human excrement. . .
From Hot Air,
Barney Frank argued this week that he had always warned about the excesses of pushing home ownership and had advocated for rentals instead. Our friends at Verum Serum couldn’t believe their ears, because Frank has long been one of the loudest voices supporting the CRA and Fannie/Freddie policies that encouraged irresponsible lending. Here’s Frank making that clear on the floor of Congress on June 27, 2005, in support of the recognition of National Home Ownership Month:
Now check what Frank claims was his position all along:
Now, suddenly, home ownership was a conservative idea, and Frank suddenly realizes that people should only buy houses when they can afford them. Only a politician could lie with such a lack of conscience, but with a surfeit of sanctimony.
His “Bubble? What bubble?” performance in June 2005 should become required viewing for anyone who wants the real history of how the economy collapsed. In another addition to the Someone Left The Irony On Department, Frank scolds the people behind the dot-com bubble for not having realistic business plans while Frank protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from regulators who warned that the two GSEs had the same exact problem. And Frank was right that the housing collapse wouldn’t be as bad as the dot-com pop — but in fact it was much, much worse, thanks to Congressional action that mandated the creation of mortgage-backed securities that spread the poison of bad loans throughout the global financial system. The dot-com bubble burst resulted in a mild recession, but Frank’s supposedly-impossible housing bubble collapse sent the entire world economy crashing into a heap.
Clueless? A liar? In this case, Frank qualifies as both.
[...] I have documented here and here, wasn’t it when Fannie and Freddie were forced to relax home mortgage lending [...]