More Obama Pals Discovered To Have Terrorist Ties

Group Embraced By Obama Hit By Canadian Government For Terror Support

 

 

 

 

” Canada’s version of the IRS, The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), has revoked the charitable status of The Islamic Society of North America (INSA) over charges that the group has channeled over $280,000 to a group in Pakistan linked to a terror outfit. Shawn Jeffords of the Toronto Sun writes: 

The CRA announced Friday it will strip the Islamic Society of North America Canada’s Development Foundation of its charitable status. 

After a nearly two-year-long audit of its books, the CRA said it found evidence linking the group to an organization that funds a terrorist organization in Pakistan.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thomas Sowell On The Housing Bubble Myth Of No Warning And Knee-Jerk Governance

 

Bouncing Ball Politics

 

 

 

 

 

” For years, home ownership was a big “good thing” among both liberal Democrats like Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, on the one hand, and moderate Republicans like President George W. Bush on the other hand.

Raising the rate of home ownership was the big red bouncing ball that they pursued out into the street, in utter disregard of the dangers.

A political myth has been created that no one warned of those dangers. But among the many who did warn were yours truly in 2005, Fortune and Barron’s magazines in 2004 and Britain’s The Economist magazine in 2003. Warnings specifically about the dangerous roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were made by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 2005 and by Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow in 2003.

In pursuit of those higher home ownership rates, especially among low-income people and minorities, the many vast powers of the federal government — from the Federal Reserve to bank regulatory agencies and even the Department of Justice, which issued threats of anti-discrimination lawsuits — were used to force banks and other lenders to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

What makes all this painfully ironic is that the latest data show that the rate of home ownership today is lower than it has been in 18 years. There was a rise of a few percentage points during the housing boom, but that was completely erased during the housing bust. Housing has been just one area where the bouncing ball approach to political decision-making has led the country into one disaster after another.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Congress’s Community Reinvestment Act Did Cause Housing Crisis … Buried News During The Christmas Season

 

Wait! Government Did Cause The Housing Bubble

 

 

 

 

” Regarding the latter example, however, there has been a persistent dispute among mainstream economists about the role of government housing policy, particularly the Community Reinvestment Act which was used, in the 1990s, to make banks increase their lending to particular low-income neighborhoods. Paul Krugman asserts, for example, that the “Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was irrelevant to the subprime boom.” Actually, no. A new NBER paper (gated) on the CRA is causing quite a stir. Authored by four economists from NYU, MIT, Northwestern, and Chicago, the paper is the first to use instrumental-variables regression to distinguish changes in bank lending caused by the CRA from changes that would likely have happened anyway. (The authors use the timing of loan decisions relative to the dates of CRA audits to identify the effect of the CRA on lending.) The results suggest that CRA enforcement did, contra Krugman, lead banks to make substantially riskier loans than otherwise. Raghu Rajan puts it in a very Austrian-sounding way:

The key then to understanding the recent crisis is to see why markets offered inordinate rewards for poor and risky decisions. Irrational exuberance played a part, but perhaps more important were the political forces distorting the markets. The tsunami of money directed by a US Congress, worried about growing income inequality, towards expanding low income housing, joined with the flood of foreign capital inflows to remove any discipline on home loans. And the willingness of the Fed to stay on hold until jobs came back, and indeed to infuse plentiful liquidity if ever the system got into trouble, eliminated any perceived cost to having an illiquid balance sheet.

I’d reverse the order of emphasis — credit expansion first, housing policy second — but Rajan is right that government intervention gets the blame all around.”

 

 

 

Related articles

• Obama: Let’s Start a New Financial Crisis (frontpagemag.com)
• Is It Time To Say Sayonara To CRA Funded Housing Agencies? (mfi-miami.com)
• Here We Go Again: Regime Pushes Banks To Make Mortgage Loans To People With Weak Credit (constitutionclub.org)
• ‘What Does the New CRA Paper Tell Us?’ (economistsview.typepad.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong ?

HERE WE GO AGAIN: WHITE HOUSE ASKS BANKS TO MAKE LOANS TO BORROWERS WITH ‘WEAKER CREDIT’

 

 

 

” The Obama administration is pushing banks to extend home loans to people with weaker credit, an initiative that the White House says will help fuel the recovery but critics say will lead to the type of conditions that caused the financial crash of 2008.

“President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession,” Zachary A. Goldfarb writes in the Washington Post.

The Obama White House explains that by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs that insure home loans from default, banks should be able to provide loans to a greater number of borrowers.

Cautious of the White House’s initiative, banks have secured assurances from housing officials that they won’t be held responsible for government approved borrowers who default on their loans.”

Illustration by Yogi Love

Related articles

• Fools Never Learn (globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com)
• White House pushes for home loans to people with weaker credit (stltoday.com)
• White House to Banks: Loan to Those With So-So Credit (newser.com)
• COLLAPSE” Obama Admin Pushes Banks To Make Home Loans To People With Weak Credit (secretsofthefed.com)
• Obama Announces Plan to Mortgage the White House (smartasset.com)
• Obama Administration wants to loosen home loan availability for people with weak credit (pubcit.typepad.com)
• Apparently Learning Nothing from the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac Disaster, the Obama Administration Wants to Subsidize Banks to Make More Dodgy Loans (danieljmitchell.wordpress.com)
• Obama Is Pushing Banks To Make More Home Loans To Borrowers With Poor Credit (financialsurvivalnetwork.com)

 

 

 

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Martin Luther King , He’s Not … or … Equal Outcome not Equal Opportunity

Our Great ” Racial Healer ” Is Wasting No Time    

 

 

 

 

Obama To Unleash Racial-Preferences Juggernaut

   If this all sounds familiar that’s because it is … can you say ” Community Reinvestment Act ” boys and girls ? For those that don’t remember ,  this policy , created during the Carter administration ,  turbo-charged by Bill Clinton and championed by the “community organizer ” crowd of Obama and his ilk , forced banks to make loans to customers regardless of their credit-worthiness thus fueling the housing bubble that led us to our current fiscal meltdown .

   This is government at it’s ” best ” … create a problem , blame the private sector , demonize them and then step in with the ” Solution ” .

  ” If your organization has a policy or practice that doesn’t benefit minorities equally, watch out: The Obama administration could sue you for racial discrimination under a dubious legal theory that many argue is unconstitutional.

President Obama intends to close “persistent gaps” between whites and minorities in everything from credit scores and homeownership to test scores and graduation rates.

His remedy — short of new affirmative-action legislation — is to sue financial companies, schools and employers based on “disparate impact” complaints — a stealthy way to achieve racial preferences, opposed 2 to 1 by Americans.

Under this broad interpretation of civil-rights law, virtually any organization can be held liable for race bias if it maintains a policy that negatively impacts one racial group more than another — even if it has no racist motive and applies the policy evenly across all groups.

Equal Outcomes

This means that even race-neutral rules for mortgage underwriting and consumer credit scoring potentially can be deemed racist if prosecutors can produce statistics showing they tend to result in adverse outcomes for blacks or Latinos.

Already, Attorney General Eric Holder has used the club of disparate-impact lawsuits to beat almost $500 million in loan set-asides and other claims out of the nation’s largest banks.

In addition to the financial settlements — which include millions in funding for affordable-housing activists — Bank of America, Wells Fargo and SunTrust have all agreed to adopt more minority-friendly lending policies. ”

 

 

We are forced to pay for sowing the seeds of our own destruction .

Related articles

• The New Racial Justice System (frontpagemag.com)
• Disadvantaged by Affirmative Action or “Disparate Impact” (aminext.com)
• An honest letter from a Liberal to me… #SOTR (stacyontheright.com)
• Black America, Barack Obama, and the racial backlash (thegrio.com)