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Government Causes Housing Crash Then Sues Everyone Else

housing crisisThe U.S. government on Friday sued 17 banking firms for their roles in the housing crash. The financial institutions are being accused of selling $196 billion dollars of now-toxic mortgage backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Federal Housing Agency (FHA) filed suits against Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan chase and 14 others. FHA is the government agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie which raises questions. Is this just a maneuver for Fannie and Freddie to recover some portion of the massive losses that they were responsible for taking on?

Fannie and Freddie have notoriously backed loans with questionable characteristics. So-called NJNA (no job no assets) loans and loans where the borrower was likely borrowing more than they could afford. This created the easy credit climate where banks, under pressure from regulators and community groups like ACORN, were pressed to make sub-prime loans. Now, the government is coming after them.

The law suits will likely have a chilling effect on the economy. Banks as a whole will now be even more timid about being involved with FHA loans that are backed by Fannie and Freddie in fear of reprisals in coming years should the housing crisis worsen.

The banks have spent the last three years rebuilding their balance sheets. Now, the legal fallout from the mortgage crisis is creating a new wave of liabilities for them and uncertainty for the financial system. News that the economy added no jobs in August and that the lawsuits were pending slammed the stock market Friday and sent bank stocks tumbling. – The Wall Street Journal

Making it more difficult for home buyers to get loans will continue to weaken housing demand and depress prices. Current home owners will continue to see their equity, and therefor personal wealth, dwindle.

Bank were pressured by progressive groups and Democrat lawmakers to make loans to lower-income buyers that in many cases could not afford the homes they were buying. In order to defray the risk, financial institutions then packaged up those mortgages into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) which Fannie and Freddie then bought – as did many other institutions.

The suits are specific to the mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie and Freddie stating that the banks misrepresented that the securities met the FHA’s underwriting rules and overstated the ability of the borrowers to repay the loans.

While the President needs the banking industry to loosen lending rules to create any semblance of a recovery, having his administration go after the largest institutions able to do so will likely create yet another government impediment to growth in the economy.

On one hand the administration is asking these banks to make credit more available to home buyers and home owners while simultaneously suing them for having done just that in the past. That kind of uncertainty and mixed-messaging is precisely what is hindering an economic turn-around.

If the government wants to place blame, a closer inspection of FHA, Fannie and Freddie, and progressive housing policies should be their focus.
The institutions so far named in the law suits are: Ally Financial, GMAC LLC (or what was GMAC), Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Countrywide, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, First Horizon , General Electric, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, First Franklin Financial, Morgan Stanley, Nomura Holdings, The Royal Bank of Scotland(RBS), and Societe Generale

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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One Comment

  1. This problem goes back to good ol’ Jimmy Carter….He started it….I remember the Bush administration attempted to do something about this during a hearing. They were mocked, ridiculed, and called racists by the black caucus…..see what happened….

    1. Agree, but it didn’t magnify until Barney Frank, along with the congressional black caucus with crony Frank Raines, imploded Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with bad loans under their “prevailing stupidity” that blacks on welfare could afford $300,000 mortgages. That is what sank the ship. If the banks don’t use this as their defense (for basically following Fannie and Freddie) they I suppose they deserve to lose.

  2. This law suet is the biggest crock of steaming crap I have ever heard! If I was those bankers I would tell this commission to go straight to hell, and I was not about to show up for a Stalin style show trial! And that is exactly what this suet is and that is nothing but a show trial. We all are not that stupid to think that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd did not tell the banks that this is what they could do? And not only that but we know damn well that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd control the laws that are made for the banks to operate by? And is the government saying that the banks did something on their own and didn’t tell the government and then used it to rip off Barney Frank and Chris Dodd? Just how stupid do they think we are? Didn’t we all go through the collapse caused by Freddie/Fannie and then for a whole year after that heard every detail about what was done which caused it? And didn’t it all come back to the fact that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd lied twice to the Housing Investigation Committee to find out how solvent Freddie/Fannie was and sit there and listen to Barney Frank tell the Commission that Freddie/Fannie were solvent and had no financial problems whatsoever? Didn’t we hear all about that, and when they collapsed we heard all about how Barney Frank lied to the commission, and in my way of thinking, he should be in prison not running Freddie/Fannie again??

    What in the hell are the banks supposed to sit there and tell these Democrats when every one of them knows how much money all these banks have contributed to the Democrats’ campaign funds? These politician’s know very well that the Democrats were the ones who have ordered the banks to sell more of these toxic mortages every month so that people like Rahm Emanuel who ran Freddie/Fannie for a couple of years and made 90 million dollars for his trouble was not ordering the banks to sell, sell, sell???

    My god, do they think our memories are that short that this would be the right time to sue that banks because they are some of these greedy filthy rich millionaires and billionaires that Obama wants to tax, and we should be going, “Yeah, burn them!”?? Not hardly!! We should be calling our representatives come Tuesday and tell them to stop this bogus Stalinist show trial Obama wants to pull on the very banks that have been his biggest contributors!! Tell them that we don’t have a short memory when it comes to our losing 45% of our investments when Freddie/Fannie collapsed because of what the government did to them and for them. These bankers should show up for this BS because it should be their opportunity to expose exactly how much money they have given all those who are behind this suet, including Obama. They should take this as an open opportunity to rip them a new butt hole!!!

  3. See, what Obama is hoping is that the bankers won’t have the guts to make that accurate accusations that need to be made implicating Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in every step of the way that led up to the collapse. These bankers should be prepared to recite back to these Democrats, and whatever Republican’s are going to sit on the committee really won’t have much to say about it since they weren’t involved in the laws the banks had to follow, and these bankers are expected to sit and just take Democrats lie about who was responisible for the collapse of Freddie/Fannie? And they are supposed to just accept their version of it? And they are supposed to just sit there and not have the guts to defend themselves?

    I will call whoever I can come next week and tell them exactly what they should do. I will find out who I need to call and I will try to talk to as high up a person as I can not only in their legal team, but the CEO’s and whoever that we the people, and least this person, is behind them if they plan on telling all as they should. I strongly support them if they plan on telling these committee members that they have done nothing wrong that they weren’t told they could do, and the ones who are sueing them are the very ones who got the most benefit out fo what the bankers were doing to make some money in protecting themselves from what they knew would happen when you sell a house to a person who can’t afford to pay for it, nor keep up payments and the bank knows that they will have to repossess the house sooner or later. And the insurance that banks were selling to protect themselves from exactly what happen in October of 2008, was something the government didn’t know anything about that they were doing? C’mon give me a break!!

  4. The banks sold their bad loans that they made to the government and that is what this is about. Don’t forget that the republicans were in the whitehouse and congress during most of this, how can anyone say it was the democrats doing it. Profit and greed did this, just like profit and greed caused outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries and tax breaks to the rich who contribute to the politicians and those wars and crooked dealing with Haliburton didn’t help us either, but that wasn’t Obama either. I’m not so sure that lawsuits are the way to address this problem, it’s way after the fact now and won’t help anyone get their homes back or save the national budget or anything but add expenses on top of expenses.

  5. Good Grief. A little history lesson is in order:
    -Bush and his administration warned us about the impending crisis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2001 and pressed for oversight over them 2003.
    -Barney and the dems at the time said NO.
    -The government’s easy credit policy and the forcing of banks to lend money to people who could not afford the loans continued on its merry way.
    -Then 2008 came around and the housing bubble burst.

    Now the government is suing the banks for doing what they were forced to do by the government?

    Give me a break.
    Regime change is in order.

    I will NEVER vote for another socialist democrat or moderate republican again. EVER.

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