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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I know it's pretty much an article of faith over on the "Faux InfoTainment Nooze Channel" and among our nation's elite policy experts like Michelle Bachman (R-Moonbase Omega), but Fannie and Freddie had little if nothing to do with our current economic mess.  They were made scapegoats so that credulous folks who don't know anything wouldn't blame the overall climate of FIRE-sector deregulation.

It's okay, though.  Lots of people think so too.[/quote]

well you would be mistaken.  they set and move the market.  hell, they ARE the market.[/quote]

Again, you've been listening to too much Michelle Bachmann.  Since this trope has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now, and since you brought it up, I'm going to assume that you're one of those shiny-eyed True Believers who are immune to evidence and think that Newt Gingrich is "a thinker", but on the off chance that there's someone out there reading this, and might think, "Hrm, maybe lower-case ALL-CAPS lower-case guy's got a point" there's a great breakdown of the numbers [url=http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/why-wallison-is-wrong-about-the-genesis-of-the-u-s-housing-crisis/]here[/url]:

[quote]It is of course well known, including by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Fannie and Freddie were responsible for some actual high-risk loans, primarily through their purchases of high-risk private-label securities for their investment portfolio as well as through purchases of actual high-risk loans for their core securitization business. Yet as Wallison knows, this actual high-risk activity by Fannie and Freddie was neither sufficient in volume nor did it come at the right time to persuasively argue that the two mortgage finance giants drove the surge in actual high-risk lending we saw in the 2000s.

Did Fannie and Freddie buy high-risk mortgage-backed securities? Yes. But they did not buy enough of them to be blamed for the mortgage crisis.[ii] Highly respected analysts who have looked at these data in much greater detail than Wallison, Pinto, or myself, including the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission majority, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and virtually all academics, have all rejected the Wallison/Pinto argument that federal affordable housing policies were responsible for the proliferation of actual high-risk mortgages over the past decade.[iii]

Indeed, it is noteworthy that Wallison’s fellow Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission—Bill Thomas, Keith Hennessey, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, all of whom are staunch conservatives—rejected Wallison’s argument as well.[/quote]

Zowee, when even Holtz-Eakin acknowledges you're wrong, you're really, really wrong.  Great way to keep the party going after it's caused the worst damage to the economy since the Great Depression, though.[/quote]

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