Look Who’s Lying…AGAIN

Why, it’s our friend Mr. Brooks.

When God put ears on this man's head, he ruined a perfectly good dick

Let’s see what he’s serving up today:  who caused the housing meltdown?  Fannie Mae and brown people.

Seriously, I’m not making this up.  He specifically cites ACORN and the Congressional Black & Hispanic Caucuses, and throws in Barney Frank for good measure.

All of this has been debunked already, so I’m not going to painstakingly go through and debunk it again – you should go read it for yourself.  But before you do, here are the facts you need to know:

1.  Bobo’s lying about the timeline, blaming the housing meltdown on affordable housing policies adopted in the 1990s, none of which stipulated that Fannie Mae was required to pick up more sub-prime loans.   In fact, at the height of the subprime lending orgy, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s overall share of sub-prime loans sold into the secondary mortgage market decreased by 50%.

2.  Bobo’s gratuitous swipe at Frank is in reference to a former partner of Frank’s, Herb Moses, who was an executive at Fannie Mae from 1991  – 1998, the year the two amicably separated…well before Fannie Mae became entangled in the subprime meltdown.  But, having already checked the boxes for “poor” and “brown”, I guess Bobo figured he should check the box for “gay” as well, to make sure all the usual suspects were demonized.

3.  At the height of subprime lending in 2006, private lenders issued 84% of the subprime loans.  That’s individual loans, not dollar amount.  Keep in mind that low-income borrowers take out much smaller loans, and are the borrowers most likely to be offered a subprime loan (again, thanks to having lower incomes).  In that same year, 83% of subprime loans to low and moderate income buyers were made by private lenders.

4.  Is it reasonable to blame the meltdown of the entire financial system on 16 or 17% of the lending activity (actually less than that in dollar terms – see #3 above) in the housing market?  No.  No, it isn’t.  And in fact, those subprime loans that were securitized by Fannie and Freddie – and keep in mind, we’re only talking about 1/6th of them – have featured default rates less than half of the default rate of subprime mortgages issued by private lenders.

Again, Bobo knows all this.  He’s not a stupid man; he’s a huge prick.  I’m just pointing out for the umpteenth time that he’s a lying sack of shit because I have some friends who still cling to a belief that he’s a reasonable person.  I guess that’s possible, if you consider it “reasonable” to pull things out of your ass to support whatever bigoted or reactionary point of view you want to reinforce.  Personally, I don’t think it’s reasonable to cling to and defend ideas that can’t be defended without lying.

If Brooks keeps this up, they’re going to have to build a bigger Dickipedia.