What Caused The Economic Crisis? Watch This! (VIDEO HAS BEEN UPDATED)
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Like most garbage this video has been removed for the betterment of the rest of society. If you all like living in squalor and allowing environmental degredation and wall st fat cats to run away with your money continue to vote for republicans.
Video has been removed again … any chance it can be posted somewhere else less interested in squashing free speech?
And Chris, perhaps you should move to a country that allows other people to decide what is for the betterment of society instead of yourself. Please don’t insult me with your narrow mindedness and allow me to enjoy my right to make up my own mind.
It took nearly 5 hours but I checked out everything mentioned in this video and it is absolutely dead on accurate. Blatantly political? What was Nancy “Socialist” Pelosi doing yesterday on her soapbox? What a speech? Great way to reach across the aisle to garner votes for a bailout that should never happen anyways. Both Obama and McCain have to support the bailout for votes come November. There are not enough true fiscal conservatives in this nation(Bush is not conservative) to win the popular vote.
We should not bail out Wall Street nor should we bail out anyone being foreclosed on. If you do not have the intellectual capacity to figure out a loan structure you have no business purchasing a home. (Find someone you trust to help you!).
The internet companies were not bailed out in the dot.com bust nor did anyone help me recoup the thousands I lost in the market when it tanked to 7400. Let the market correct itself. Let credit tighten. Maybe we need a good recession/depression to wake all of the generations that did not go through the Great Depression.
Not everyone deserves a home. It is not a right nor an entitlement. And do not even get me started on Social Security……….
For all of you who need the video:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f67_1222761495
It will not play on Foxfire unless you have updated flash.
Jim:
I knew much of this story already, but have never seen it presented with such clarity and emphasis.The RNC should buy as much tv air time as they can afford and run this every day until the election. It tells a story that should be told—and if truly heard and seen by them—will enrage the American electorate.
Burnie Ballard
Executive Committeeman
Chesterfield County
.
When you watch the video you can pause at anytime. The link below looked up each and every article and graph. They have links if you scroll down to all of the information presented in the video except a couple of graphs.
http://themountainsage.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/video-burning-down-the-house-what-caused-our-economic-crisis/
All I would like to say anyone reading this is obtain and read all the information yourself then vote.
I am a valedictorian (:)) so I had no problem keeping up with the video.
Nevertheless, I knew something was up with Obama but I couldn’t
figure out what it was. I consider Obama suspect, overall the crux
of the matter is that these companies (financiers) were able to
get away with ‘predatory’ lending. In effect, baiting the family with
false hopes and promises is no way to treat a hard working citizen.
It was the Federal Reserve, stop pointing fingers at either party. We need financial reform. Wake up people. 2 party system is corrupt.
Thank you Senator DeMint for shining the light of truth on this power-grab-gone-bad. I am seriously tempted to move across the state line and become a sand-lapper instead of a tar-heel resident just so I could vote for Jim DeMint!
Liberal politicians and bureaucrats cooked up this scheme in the 90’s in order to seize power and endear themselves to the intended beneficiaries of sub-prime lending. We, the people are to blame for continuing to re-elect power hungry individuals who will do anything – even if criminal or treasonous – to maintain their power. I am beginning to understand why courageous American patriots decided to rid themselves of the tyranny of King George in 1776. That conflict too was over burdensome taxes, liberty denied and tyrannical power run amuck. Perhaps Jefferson was right. Maybe we do need a good revolution every couple of hundred years to keep a democratic republic healthy. Power to the governed, not the government!
I agree with everything except the reference to immigration… they work too hard for too little , just like the Irish , and all other historic ethnic immigrants in US. They need a system to induct people wanting to come to our country and work hard and make a life for themselves… alittle competition in the workplace is good. get our dead lazy american kids up and in school and in work and being productive…
We couldn’t agree more with this. No one however is getting this information. I want to throw rotten tomatoes at the tv screen everytime I see Barney Frank, Pelosi, along with Chris Dodd parading before the public blaming everyone else. Do they think no one knows how to read or what? They should be ashamed to show their hypocritical faces in public. They are an embarrassment to themselves. And we will not forget this come their election times. Schummer and Reid are no better. We are independents and they have certainly helped us make up our minds not to vote democratic in this election. All of congress should be thrown into the recycling bin and deleted. Keep up the good work and try and get this video in front of mainstream media. Maybe someone there has the b—-s to show it. Sharon& Bruce
Overnight the entire financial system of the country is being changed from a Capitalist free enterprise to a Socialist system. The take over of AIG Insurance, whose primary coverage was municipal bonds, effectively removes the municipal bond market. This guarantee of State obligations changes them to federal obligations. Same as Treasury Bonds.
This bail out of subprime mortgage foreclosures effectively lets people who have been paying their mortgages on a timely basis also pay for the illegals who are refusing to pay for their inflated homes. We are not only giving the country away, we are paying them to take it.
Harry Reid and Barney Frank were aware of the situation and this is why they insisted that FNMA purchase these mortgages on a wholesale basis. These are the people who should be impeached and jailed
Respectfully,
Richard C. Evans, CPA
the maker of the video has done another one, it has some of the same information as well as new information. I looked up the links to the articles and graphs on it as well. You can see it at my blog. The video is Covering Your Fannie:
http://themountainsage.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/covering-your-fannie-who-really-caused-our-economic-crisis/
In addition there is a Fox video with Alabama Congressman Davis admitting the Democrats were wrong on the Fannie and Freddie issue.
Video: We were wrong says Democratic Congressman Davis of Alabama (It’s on the front page about halfway down)
Why isn’t Senator McCain using this? It was excellent, a little fast but excellent. I believe that Obama needs to be investigated along with all of the execs at Fannie and Freddie, AIG. Golden parachutes discuss me, especially at the cost of the American people who work so hard for their money. We are in so much trouble and if our government does not step it up and really see what happened, as far back as 1995 then we better ready our selves for a revolution.
Dear Senator Demint and the rest of you Republicans,
This video is factually wrong and simply another Rovian lie perpetrated by the same people who gave us this economic crisis through deregulation (see Sen. Phil Gram of Texas), the criminal war in Iraq, Agu-Greib, secretly spying on US citizens, shredding of the US Constitution, Christian Fundamentalist fascists, rampant corruption, etc, etc.etc….
Yes, you got it – I am publically calling anyone who has had anything to do with the creation of this video a liar. Prove me wrong with facts – not innuendoes – you morons! You really disgust me. You stink!
Republicans – watch the polls to see what America thinks of you.
I would be ashamed to call myself a Republican these days – it has become a dirty word synonymous with a LIAR. Your end is near – NOV. 4th – and you won’t be able to steal the election this time around.
Good bye and get lost along with your vile propaganda machine!
Tom Harris
Houston, TX
P.S. You can contact me at the above email address anytime. I’ll be happy to disprove the allegations posted in this video with well researched facts but I suspect that your narrow-mindedness will prevail and you will prefer to live in ignorance rather than try to get to know the truth.
This is a classic piece straight from the propaganda mill: the music at the start sounded like “JAWS”, and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the end seemed to be giving the piece GOD’S blessing. It made me sick to think some people will actually believe this junk. The video moved too fast so one could not read some of the out-of-focus background and have the time to reason with what was being presented.
There’s pages upon pages of people debunking this video some 15 or so pages ago but the gist of it is this: The CRA isn’t responsible for the over-inflation of house prices or banks bundling mortgages and selling them, that’s from the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that basically repealed Glass Steagall.
What people who buy this shit don’t understand is that if the government was “forcing” these banks to give money to people (which doesn’t make sense but that’s what they keep saying the CRA is supposed to do) then houses would be massively UNDER-valued because banks would be fighting to give the least amount of money they could.
Instead, the repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed banks to basically sell a mortgage to whomever, bundle it up with a bunch of other mortgages, then sell that bundle as an investment that would “mature” and be worth more than what the buyer paid for it. For example, if the bank bundled up 5 $200,000 mortgages and sold it for $750,000, the buyer of the bundle would basically be assuming to make $250,000 on it when the homeowners finished paying up, which they failed to do, devaluing all those pieces of paper they’d been trading back and forth for the last decade. The bank doesn’t care, though, because they make their money back and a tidy profit off the short-term sale, it was the long-term owners of those mortgage bundles that got fucked.
The guy who made the video figures if he just throws enough shit at the audience with a “GRRRRR DEMOCRATS!” message that people will get confused and just assume it’s the Democrats’ fault. Information overload. But it’s pretty simple: Phil Gramm, McCain’s chief economic advisor, also behind the Savings & Loans scandal of the 80’s (which resulted in the biggest bank failure in history up until WaMu last week), repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999 which allowed banks to consolidate commercial and investment holdings and go wild on short-term profit by selling mortgages as investments. They overvalued every thing they had, sold it all, and then when people couldn’t pay up, every one freaked out because no one knew what anything was worth anymore, every body wrote off their investments as losses, stopped lending to each other, and then the institutions collapsed.
Mortgage defaults didn’t cause this crisis. Waves of personal bankruptcies and loan defaults aren’t anything new. The problem is that financial institutions won’t extend credit to each other, not just because some are carrying bad mortgages, but because their assets may consist principally of mortgages whose only known value was set by the company that owns the mortgage.
Every company has to have assets equal to their operating needs. A manufacturer has to have enough assets that are liquid (can be easily converted to cash) to buy materials and pay their employees. Commercial banks hold customers deposits and must have enough liquid asses to accommodate the maximum foreseeable withdrawals.
Financial banks provide working capital for business startups and expansions by underwriting stocks and bonds – they give the company the capital and then sell the stocks and bonds to recoup their investment. They’ve got to have liquid assets sufficient to cover stocks and bonds between their issuance and sale. Insurers who often insure stocks, bonds and business ventures have to have sufficient liquid assets to cover claims.
When one company can do all three types of financial business, a crisis in any of them can drain off liquid assets and cause a companywide failure. When the different types of financial institutions are intermingled, a crisis in one quickly becomes a crisis in all.
This was one of the primary causes of the bank runs that sparked the Great Depression. To insulate the different types of financial businesses, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933, which prohibited doing business in more then one financial arena.
In 1999, at the behest of financial institutions that wanted a piece of every pie, Phil Gramm rammed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) through a Republican controlled Congress. This repealed the Glass-Steagall firewall and opened the door to industry wide failure, again.
Now that he’d built the coffin, Gramm nailed down the lid. In late 2000, as the Clinton administration was becoming the Bush administration, Congress was rushing to pass the annual Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act to move budget account surpluses to cover shortfalls. At the last minute, Gramm slipped in a 262 page amendment called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA). The dense and obtusely technical language was passed as part of the budget bill without debate.
This act almost totally deregulated derivatives, aka futures. Now each company that held derivatives, like subprime mortgages, was free to determine their value when calculating the value of their liquid assets, with little or no government verification. Any company that wanted to overextend itself could simply overvalue its derivatives and hope they didn’t get caught in a cash crunch.
They did. Companies who can’t meet their cash obligations go belly up. Normally, a company caught in a cash crunch borrows cash on short terms with its less liquid assets as collateral. But no one knows which mortgage assets are likely to fail and which ones’ value is overstated. So nobody loans and everything crashes.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 prohibited redlining, effectively saying that, if your bank or loan company’s market is Onondaga County, you can’t just loan money in Skaneateles and Manlius and decline all applications from the city. It didn’t require lenders to issue bad loans; pure greed did that.
CRA was passed in 1977. GLBA and CFMA were passed in 1999 and 2000. Things started to come apart in 2005. If CRA caused this, it took three decades to do it.
this video is great fodder for those that hold a closed mind. the issue is bigger than the onesided opinion that this holds. lets not forget who was not monitoring this the past 7 years. But do not take my word on it read someone elses
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/opinion/02Cohen.html?em
The comments and analysis of Reality Check are right on. I expect that there is no one in any segment of business, banking or wall street that is pleased with the need for the government to infuse capital to avert a financial disaster in this country but that is the situation they have created by letting greed drive thier decisions.
And during this very difficult time, a segment of our government (House of Representatives), about 60% of the Republicans (the Far Right) and 40% of the Democrats (the Far Left) have decided to stand on the sidelines and let the fire created by thier failure to govern sensibly burn.
Senator DeMints points out that past legislation has helped create the problem. Unfortunetly, he is taking a stand of blaming the other side for all the problems, even though our Republican party controlled congress during a major portion of time when the problem grew. Congress had a chance to bring calm to the situation but blew it. There is no leadership today in either party that is stepping up and providing direction. Both sides blew it and now they justify that by pointing at each other.
The Stock Market just closed down another 3.5% with a jobs report due tomorrow that is expected to top 7%. We need action, not You Tube propaganda trying to place blame.
This is an embarassing distortion of facts, generated by Rove, promoted by Limbaugh, and these lies have no place being spread by a taxpayer paid staff or website! We are not in economic difficulty because Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., or Bill Clinton sponsored a program to promote home ownership for low income Americans! In just one example, there is no way, except maybe by flashing graphics quickly to african drum music, that anybody would believe that those basically sound programs could lead one to believe that they dictated “no income verification”?!?
The abuses in the mortgage industry were caused by banking deregulation and reduced oversight, promoted by the radical Republican policy groups (i.e., Heritage Foundation) and promoted by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, George Bush Jr., John Mccain and Mitt Romney. No, were not in trouble because a bank helped a low income couple buy a $80,000 house in Houston- which they’re still in and still paying for- clearly, this collapse was caused by wealthier investors who bought 5, 10, even 20 homes, then flipped them to try to gain grotesque profits for little productivity- most of which now sit empty- and also by the wealthy Americans who have built $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 mcmansions, using nothing-down loans, and now have abandoned them because they’ve declined in value.
Stop spreading this BS
I remember the Democrats screeming about “redlining” and demanding more loans for minorities, Now Poliski and her crew blame the failure on Bush. I wish McClain would start raising his voice and pointing his finger to make a point. He needs to be more aggressive and be more adament about placing the blame. He comes across as being half asleep.
get obama out of the race,do you want this coruption in the white house?
The democrats have been doing this all my lifetime and I’m 85 years old. It goes even further back than most people realize. The root of this problem goes to the greed of the voters. We have learned that we can vote ourselves a raise and many people vote that way and don’t know or care the results. This really started back in the FDR era. The “New Deal.” “A chicken in every pot” philosophy espoused by the democrats. FDR didn’t solve the depression of the 1930s and we were still in a depression when FDR and a democrat congress declared war on Germany. That was a right move and is the only thing responsible for bringing us out of the derpression. It was not, repeat, not, from any wise legislation coming out of the democrat congress. This bailout of Wall Street is just another version of the “chicken in every pot” philosophy of the democrats. If Barrack Obama is elected president of the United States you can rest assured we will taxed beyond our ability to pay. Obama’s plan for medicare, social security, and all the so called “entitlement” programs will put American Citizens in a virtual state of slavery. We will no longer have any say so about what our constituiton means and, I believe, will be jailed just for questioning the congress or the president.
GOD Bless America.
Why are’nt you running for President Senator DeMint?
I am not taking sides here because I hate both candidates but here are my thoughts being in the mortgage industry.
The Community reinvestment act pushed banks to make loans in areas where income was low. It did NOT push them to do loans with no income documentation on adjustable rate mortgages. This was the banks bad decision. If the income/employment was verified and the people got a fixed rate we wouldnt have people walking away from their homes because they cant afford them.
I work for a bank (that shall remain nameless) that is currently eating the principal balance on their mortgages for clients that owe more than the homes value. Doing this, they can get these people into something stable. These are people who have been making their payment for 3 years and now their rate is about to go up and they will not be able to afford it.
FIXED RATES AND INCOME VERIFICATION COULD HAVE SPARED THIS WHOLE THING.
This is an excellent video concerning its content. However, it needs to be put in a different format. The video moves too fast. The music is distracting. It should be put on the internet in a fashion that can be read in a normal way with links to the sources and in a way that we can print it out to give to relative and friends. Googling everything is not efficient in my opinion. And there are many older voters who do not use computers at all and will never see the video. Some of them lived through the depression and think FDR was a hero. Therefore they still vote Democrat. They need to see the information that is in the video but they never will in its present format. It’s 16 days to election. No time to waste. Thank you for the e-mail Senator DeMint. You need to run for President