Best. Explanation of sub-prime mortgage crisis. Ever
Jay Rosen calls the special This American Life episode on the mortgage/credit crisis “probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard.” After listening to the podcast yesterday, I’ve got to agree. Not only do I now understand what happened, I think I’m actually going to remember the explanation.
Furthermore, the show focuses on the question that really bothers most of us: What the hell were we thinking? Didn’t we know that offering huge loans to anyone who walked in was unlikely to end well? The show interviews people at different levels in the process, and asks them exactly that.
It is a great piece of journalism. And be sure to read Jay’s piece about it, which is both insightful and wise.
Categories: infohistory, media
Did it cover that Congress wanted to push more homeownership in the 80s and laxed the rules then, because it would be an incomplete picture without that bit.
david, i know you’re a word geek as much as myself, so i have a terribly pedantic question to ask.
why did you use the term “we?”
you and i had nothing to do with approving these unbelievably dumb and short-sighted loans. shouldn’t your questions be, “what the hell were mortgage lenders and their wall street enablers thinking? didn’t they know that offering huge loans to anyone who walked in was unlikely to end well?”
of course, i’m imagining the parties responsible must’ve recognized a glitch in the system that could be employed to stuff their pockets, so the questions seem rhetorical by nature, anyways.
sorry if this is an annoying comment, but if you and i are truly of the “we” then we are both in direct opposition to the “they”… and i’m not.
You and Jay are both right. So were Ethan (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/.....-not-seen/) and I (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/m.....ge-crisis/) when we blogged about that piece when it first aired!
I’m not hurt, though. If you didn’t take Ethan’s word for it then, why should you have taken mine??
Now that you know that my taste in radio is as good as Jay’s, may I recommend the 7/29 podcast of Radio Lab, Robert Krulwich’s commencement address to CalTech? (hope Marlboro went well, I loved the text.)
Ah, Persephone! I admit to not keeping up with It All, which unfortunately even includes people I admire and respect, such as you and Ethan. I’ve been a Krulwich fan since he was NPR’s economics reporter (in the 1970s? 80s? 30s?), so I’ll be sure to take a listen.
Sean, I use the “we” as a way of acknowledging collective responsibility for a systemic problem. But, yeah, I don’t feel any direct responsibility, other than not paying attention or caring until it was way too late. Also, it’s a way of saying that the motives of the individuals up and down the chain were normal human motives. One of the virtues of the This American Life piece is that it doesn’t demonize anyone (although it gets pretty smug about the fast-cars-fast-women lifestyle of one of the little-ish fish in the pond). The motives are more “we” than “them.”
might also have something to do with This American Life being, like, one of the best radio shows EVER…
eh… you’re too kind. i have enough problems i contribute to passively — living in a country run by the current administration, for one — for me to toss this one on the barbie as well. IMO this mess is only as systemic as the people within that system allowed it to be.
of course it took people desperate for home ownership to make this happen, but i’d say their culpability ended with them entering into a terribly faulty and under-regulated legal contract — one that was prepared by folks who figured they could successfully reinvent economic checks and balances with a shell game.
i’ll listen to the podcast tonight.
i actually heard this report a few weeks ago.
i’m definitely not part of the systemic “we” that includes boiler room college grads who made $60k per month selling bonds that were known by all, in their guts, to be bad.
i went to art school; i hate that people are/were calling these guys “creative brokers.” more knowledgeable brokers and banks hired these money hungry post-grads to do their dirty work because they knew they wouldn’t care about their contribution to the fraud.
every person that got paid to work their angle in this system should be demonized.
A look into Barack Obama’s past might shed some light on the crisis
Barack Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ more than 20 years ago and considered the church pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his mentor. Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.” In his sermons, Rev. Wright repeated denunciations of the U.S and blurted out statements like “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
Looking at Obama’s ties to Rev. Wright, and his connections to a terrorist bomber, William Ayers, both men who would like nothing more than to destroy this country causes many people to second guess Obama’s intentions for change. If you have not heard about William Ayers, you can read about him in the U.S. News, Michael Barone’s column-Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers. “In my U.S. News column, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season. To get an idea of how close they were, check out Tom Maguire’s Just One Minute blog and Steve Diamond’s Global Labor and Politics. The Obama-Ayers relationship is also mentioned in David Freddoso’s The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.”
Lets examine Obama’s connection with an accused political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko. The following is on explanation by Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz from ABC News. “In sharp contrast to his tough talk about ethics reform in government, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., approached a well-known Illinois political fixer under active federal investigation, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, for “advice” as he sought to find a way to buy a house shortly after being elected to the United States Senate. Rezko had been widely reported to be under investigation by the U.S. attorney and the FBI at the time Obama contacted him and has since been indicted on corruption charges by a federal grand jury in a case that prosecutors say involves bribes, kickbacks and “efforts to illegally obtain millions of dollars.”
Because Barack Obama was a dependable ally of subsidized developers in the Legislature, his friend and fund-raiser Rezko depended on him to get things done such as cosponsoring a bill in 2001 allowing developers to pocket half of the proceeds from selling state tax credits to others. Obama admitted that his decision to involve Rezko was “a bone-headed mistake.” What he failed to mention is that he has a closet full of bone-headed mistakes such as Peter Wallsten pointed out in the Los Angeles Times on
January 24, 2008.
“Barack Obama angered fellow Democrats in the Illinois Senate when he voted to strip millions of dollars from a child welfare office on Chicago’s West Side. But Obama had a ready explanation: He goofed.
“I was not aware that I had voted no,” he said that day in June 2002, asking that the record be changed to reflect that he “intended to vote yes.”
That was not the only misfire for the former civil rights attorney first elected to the state Senate in 1996. During his eight years in state office, Obama cast more than 4,000 votes. Of those, according to transcripts of the proceedings in Springfield, he hit the wrong button at least six times.”
Now comes the big question, what exactly does a community organizer do?
One thing Barack Obama did as a community organizer was pressure banks to make bad loans. In Barack Obama’s youthful community organizing days he joined a group called ACORN. Using the Community Reinvestment Act which was designed to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, ACORN started abusing the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in ’subprime’ loans to minorities with bad or no credit. Using charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansions have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.
Other things that ACORN did as community organizers were agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits and organize voter registration drives. In 2006 for example, their voter registration drive in Washington produced 1,800 new voters of which 1,794 names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the “worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.”
If you like to know more, watch these two videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....RmB93McZeI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....MGT_cSi7Rs
Cybercorrespondent
http://cybercorrespondent.blog.....spot.com
Thursday morning I turned on the news and heard that ACORN is under investigation for voter fraud in a number of states. Since I learned not to trust what the media tells us, I decided to have a look what the bloggers had to say. On a sight called A Look Into Barack Obama’s Past – Obamamania – Zimbio website I found the following comment that made me think.
A concerned citizen
Oct-6-08 7:48pm [Edit]
Those two videos paint a very clear picture. As the terrorists have promised, they will destroy this country from with in. …..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....uN9X1mVgRA ……..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....jvBEKrGkDI …….
Back to my point. By allowing the voter fraud to go on, makes this great country look like a third world dictatorship. We are supposed to send an example to the rest of the world how honest elections are held and not allow the media to distort the facts. Please people, wake up and tell the media no more. Boycott all the products advertised on publications like the Newsweek, Time magazine and other propaganda machines like the New York Times. Also do the same with CNN and other communist propaganda news sources. Even the Fox News network is starting to sway the viewer decision. After Thursday’s presidential debate, watching Chris Wallace interview a communist from Saint Louis made me sick. Even bad journalists should realize that when you ask a communist or a skin head to give you their views, you can pretty much expect what they are going to say.
I certainly had enough of all of the $%#@Comunism.org
Cybercorrespondent
well done! Thx!
Personally I have heard some very interesting explanations of the sub prime mortgage crisis. The most interesting has to be the repackaging of subprime mortgages as standard mortgages.