I've watched, I've listened, and I've read. I know what caused the credit market failure because I was NECK DEEP in it's build-up and it's collapse. Yes, you can blame me for a part of it. I'll explain later.
Now we are at a stage where we are taking drastic measures to secure our future. Are we taking the right steps?
Yes. And No.
Yes: We are investing money that will create huge government-funded construction projects putting people to work as they are being built and employing future work to keep them up and running. This makes jobs. Yay Jobs! Let's all have a job orgy!
No: We are investing in projects that won't create a single dime for the economy. Why? Because building government buildings and creating government jobs does not create wealth. It takes tax money to keep them up and running. So we just secured nearly a TRILLION DOLLARS in future taxes, PLUS TRILLIONS MORE that it will take to run them in the future. Now we are looking at a possible additional stimulus bill that will cost us nearly as much. A trillion dollars equals $2700 for every citizen. Another trillion puts that at $5,400 per person. That's per person, not per TAX PAYER. So if you have a family of 4, you're looking at $21,600! This is on top of the 40% the government takes form you now.
Worse yet: The stimulus bill doesn't address what went wrong: Congress FORCED the banks to give loans that were doomed to fail.
-Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (Carter) (Required banks to report the race and gender of applicants on home loans, added a plethora of regulations, made loan applications look like War and Peace, with footnotes.)
-Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (Carter) (Required banks to lend to disqualified borrowers if they were a minority race or had bad credit:
) -Depository Institutions Deregulation Act 1980 (Carter) (Reduced the amount banks had to keep in the Reserve)
-Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act of 1982 (Reagan) (Allowed banks more flexibility in lending... meh, had an effect.)
-Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 (Clinton) (Made it so advocacy groups could influence lending practices.)
-1995 revision to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (Clinton) (Heavily revised the act, making it so banks could take money from securities showing a false AAA rating (which regulators ignored in the name of "affordable housing", and forced more bad loans, without any stipulation that they still be able to operate at a profit.
According to Obama, the sole act that created the meltdown was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which allowed banks to do insurance. WTF??? This makes banks MORE stable by diversifying!!! What are you talking about Mr. Obama??? It resulted in mergers between insurance companies, and banks. But I'm real interested in hearing Obama's theory on how those mergers caused these banks to go down.
Bush and the republican congress warned of a possible financial meltdown as a result of lending policy as early as 2003, but were voted down. Congress, namely the Democrats were in denial:
said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. The war-time economy may have actually postponed the meltdown several years. Still today, about the only hiring industry is the defense industry. Oh, but wait... Obama's cutting defense spending as well!
So if I was the president, this is what the solution would be:
Stimulus Package would be primarily a reserve account for banks to draw from gradually over 3 years free of interest, for the purpose of purchasing bad equity from other banks that are in the can. This makes the stronger banks healthier and relieves the unhealthy banks of bad equity.
That's about it. The rest would be fluff. Once you do this, the credit market would move on it's own and jobs would return as a result of private investment again. Private investment the engine that actually CREATES WEALTH!!!
And for those of you that point to his tax cuts as proof that it won't cost you anything, take a look at the costs of services when companies are forced to pay for you. Guess what? They just went up. Everything does. But your income did not. Know what that's called? INFLATION!
So F*** YOU OBAMA, NOT ONE OF THOSE EARMARKS WILL GET ANY OF MY PROJECTS OFF THE GROUND, AND WILL ONLY COST ME MORE!
So what did I do to destroy the economy? I designed the homes that are sitting empty now. I saw who was getting the loans, and knew I was designing homes for people that should not be qualified to live in them. Average homes went from 1,600 sq. ft. to 2,500 sq. ft.! But I designed them anyway. Sorry.