Just a week back, on Jan. 16, Charles Gasparino, a member of the CNBC business team, was on Tucker, and he brought up this point. In fact he suggested that the roots of this pressure from government (count the MSM in on it as well) to make loans more readily available to lower income and minority home buyers, who never could afford to join in the party before, came more from the Clinton administration than the Bush administration. That should not be a surprise.

Surely someone out there has written intelligently on this sometime here recently?? So far all we get from the Democrats and the MSM is blaming it all on Bush.

Secondly, this housing crisis (think bubble again) even amongst the progressive socialist left, has it's roots in the Clinton era (sure, Krugman's going to go out and push that back to the Reagan years of "change").

Dean Baker, Bursting Bubbles, said this back in May of 2003 (my bold):

.. given the loss of more than $8 trillion in paper wealth in the stock market. Consumption has stayed strong in the post-crash world because of a second asset bubble. As was the case in Japan in the ’80s, the stock market bubble of the late ’90s was accompanied by a housing bubble. The rise in home prices since 1995 has outpaced the overall rate of inflation by more than 30 percentage points. This sort of run-up in home prices has no precedent in the post-war era. The surge in home prices has created more than $3 trillion in new housing wealth, as compared to a situation in which home prices had just kept pace with inflation.

Like stock wealth, housing wealth also spurs consumption. Families see the rising value of their homes as a source of wealth that they can draw upon to meet their needs. They have been drawing on this wealth with a vengeance in the past two years, as plunging interest rates have led to an unprecedented surge in mortgage borrowing. As a result, the ratio of mortgage debt to home equity is at near-record highs.

This situation is frightening for two reasons. First, as a short-run matter, if housing prices fall sharply in some of the areas where the effects of the bubble are largest (for example the Boston, New York, Washington, and San Francisco areas), new home buyers (and those who recently refinanced their mortgages and took money out) could find they have negative equity in their homes. If someone borrows $270,000 to buy a $300,000 home, and the price falls by one-third, this leaves them owing $70,000 more than the home is worth. When this happens, there is a huge incentive to just let the mortgage holder foreclose on the home. If this were to happen on a large scale, the survival of many banks and financial institutions would be at risk.

[..]

.. The bubble will persist as long as people expect home prices to rise. When they lose this expectation, housing prices will fall back to more normal levels.

The ’90s stock bubble is also partially responsible for other recent problems. One is the switch from surpluses to deficits at both the federal and state levels. The federal government collected almost $120 billion in capital gains tax revenue at the peak of the stock bubble in 2000, most of which came from gains on stock sales. When stock prices plunged, capital gains revenue did also. It is now projected at $51 billion in 2003. Many states, especially California, were similarly affected by the stock crash.

Catch that?? what caused the shift from surplus to deficits.

The wave of corporate accounting scandals was also an outgrowth of the bubble. In an era in which corporations were routinely putting out profit projections that defied common sense, it was virtually inevitable that some executives would take the additional step to outright fraud. This was entirely predictable, since every prior speculative bubble has also been accompanied by large-scale financial fraud...

Ah, a liberal who had something constructive to say about the Clinton era -- and his friends in the MSM ignored him -- looking to blame all on Bush.

What a great idea...for him. His wealth will continue to grow while the rest of us won't. 

This guy is a scumbag.

Nathan Burchfiel - I don't know if you write your own headlines, but that's not really what the article says.

Yes, George Soros is politically repulsive. 

However, what he says is that great international money center banks - like CitiBank - cannot be allowed to fail.  He says that governments must step in with massive loans to keep them afloat, and that investors who own stock in those banks will have to surrender some or all of their stock to the government in exchange for those loans.

When you consider the consequences of a great bank collapsing, this is really not a radical or a terribly bad idea.   

If he is, we're screwed.  Who can stop him?  It isn't as if Bush(43) would let DOJ investigate. He's too busy "being nice".

Newsbusters. Log on and find out What the heck is so yummy over here!

I started hearing "The Three Stooges" theme song playing in my head.

Wow... If he weren't so damn dangerous he'd be a crack up.

Happy Trails...