Hot on the heels of Soccer Dad’s post on the media’s anti-John McCain bias I found this little gem. Congress is about to hold hearings on the financial crisis. They want a scapegoat. They will not, of course, hold a mirror up to themselves declaring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be sound, even though they’re on video declaring it. They’re going to blame—well, guess.
Democrats see the prime culprits as greedy Wall Street executives and lax government regulations under a Republican administration, a view that the administration and Republicans in Congress dispute strongly.
Once praised as the “maestro” of the U.S. financial system during the 1990s economic boom, Greenspan, who was succeeded in 2006 by Ben Bernanke, was likely to find himself defending actions he took that are being blamed for contributing to the current crisis.
Critics charge that he left interest rates too low in the early part of this decade, spurring an unsustainable housing boom, while also refusing to exercise the Fed’s powers to impose greater regulations on the issuance of new types of mortgages, including subprime loans. It was the collapse of these mortgages and rising defaults a year ago that triggered the current crisis.
Greenspan, true to his Republican free-market principles, successfully opposed attempts to impose tighter controls on complex financial contracts known as derivatives, which are largely unregulated and which some see as a contributing factor in the current problems.
Wow. Just—wow. Could the media be any more obvious as the Democratic Party’s water carriers?
(Note regarding the title of this post: Pravda was the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party under the Soviet Union.)
Pravda, as Snoopy the Goon, would tell us is Russian for “truth.” (Right?)
Wow Meryl, have you been channeling Newt Gingrich?
I’d say “great minds” and all that, but I don’t know that you’d consider it a compliment.
For more information on the derivatives (Credit Default Swaps) which are a 60 trillion debt with no collateral behind it, see this story by Sixty Minutes.
I don’t watch Greta, so I guess we were on the same wavelength. I am not a fan of Newt’s, however.
Jeff, not the point. The point is the sliming of the Republlicans.
And the article backs you up and explains we would not be having these problems if Wall Street executives had used their brains.