CNBC Poll: Who's Most To Blame For The 2008 Crisis?

[DFF]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/31555590

Since the word "most" is included, I gotta go with Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Bank.

[axiomata]

All of the above is tempting too; but I went with the Fed for the effect.

[DXDoug]

ya voted for the fed as well. dam them!

[Barney]

All of the above is tempting too; but I went with the Fed for the effect.

I would agree that all of the above deserves blame, but the poll's asking who's MOST To Blame For The 2008 Crisis?
The Fed hands down for me.

[puppetmaster]

bump.... Fed tied for third......

[slacker921]

Regulators should be above the American consumer..

[Original_Intent]

I love how they put George Bush at the top of the list, Clinton is nowhere to be seen. And while I agree that blaming Obama would be ludicrous, that's MY opinion and it certainly should have been an option.

[loarmistead]

I voted all of the above:

Congress - particularly in the 70's and 90s, along with the Justice Dept, basically forced lenders to accept certain quotas or ratios of minority and lower income applicants. If the lender fell below quota, they were prosecuted by Mr. Janet Reno for redlining. Congress passed the spawn of this satan - The Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, and renewed it with a lot of the racially profiling strings attached throughout the 90s. One of their marvelous ideas was to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take out loans at lower-than-market rates in order to make it easier for the minority and lower income beneficiaries of the CRA to obtain their loans, conveniently and unconstitutionally backed by our tax dollars.

Financial Institutions - We'd like to blame them for being greedy and predatory, but in reality, predatory lending, for which there is still no definition, was only used in an extreme minority of the cases. Financial institutions, when it comes to lending, are for all intents and purposes controlled by the federal government, for reasons listed above. They can lend to whomever they wish, but if they don't lend to who the politicians want them to lend to, they are prosecuted and fined.

Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve - There's nothing "irrationally exuberant" about what the economy does when you put interest rates at zero. If you make money free, people spend more of it... I mean I don't have my PhD in Economics or anything so take that logic with a grain of salt.

President G Dubya - The American Dream Downpayment Act. In the grand scheme of things, he used taxpayers dollars to further subsidize what had essentially already been in effect for a decade before him. His role was much less than that of, say, Bill Clinton, who conveniently didn't make it on the list of possible choices.

The American consumer - They bought houses they couldn't afford. And they were too stupid to read their loan agreements to see that their 0-down and subprime mortgage payments would go up once the interest was paid off, or once the introductory interest rate expired.

Regulators - for this section I'll blame the federally monopolized bond rating agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch). They gave AAA ratings to risky paper compiled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were compiled using "creative mortgages," which were developed by financial institutions to better meet quotas set by congress and the DOJ.

State and local governments - particularly those leftists in coastal California, Florida, and New England. They enacted land control legislation that drove up the price of real estate to unGodly levels. Their leftist counterparts in DC assumed that it couldn't possibly be government's intervention in the real estate market that was causing their real estate prices to go up so much faster than the rest of the country, so they took it upon themselves to create more and more government programs, for government to intrude more and more in the real estate market, in an attempt to create "affordable housing." Little did they realize that housing would become more affordable if they simply reversed their previous legislation... but ironically after the bubble that they created collapsed, they are the very ones standing up saying that this failure was the fault of financial institutions and the free market, and that government intervention is required to fix the problem... my oh my, how lies can change the course of history.

[Lovecraftian4Paul]

Just voted for the Fed. I also laughed at how Bush was at the top of the poll. I'm pleased to see not many people are falling for the blind "It's all Bush's fault!" anymore. He was a stupid puppet, but by no means a main actor in the catastrophes that happened the past eight years. As everyone here already knows, the institutions like the Fed are the real demon networks causing most of this country's problems.

[t0rnado]

All of them.

[gilliganscorner]

Hmm. I didn't see the choice:

"A complacent and subservient media shilling for government."

on the menu. Oh oh....I get it...they're only the messengers..:rolleyes: