Finally, Karl Rove sets the record straight on the 2008 financial crisis.
Rove slams Obama and democrats for their inaction and interference prior to the housing meltdown:
Here’s Rove on the housing meltdown:
“We started in 2001 to try and reign in Fannie and Freddie. We spent four years doing it. We got a bill through the Senate Finance Committee on a party line vote to reign in Fannie and Freddie in 2005 and one of the first things Barack Obama did when he came in to the United States senate was, because he was the third largest recipient of Fannie and Freddie money he joined a filibuster of every democrat led by Senator Chris Dodd to block that measure from being brought to the floor of the United States Senate. Three years later in September 2008 President Obama, then candidate Obama, voted for the same bill he could have voted for three years ago after Fannie and Freddie collapsed. So don’t tell me that we didn’t try to do something during the Bush years to reign in the housing problem. We were the people who said let us subject Fannie and Freddie to the same kind of scrutiny that we subject banks, savings and loans and credit unions and it was candidate Obama who refused to join that effort, that would have kept this from being an accelerant to a worldwide financial crisis.”
True.
President Bush publicly called for the reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Democrats, on the other hand, blocked reform numerous times.
It was later reported after the 2008 election that Bush had nothing to do with the financial crisis. Hoover Institution visiting fellow Scott S. Powell wrote in Barron’s in February of this year that the present crisis began in the 1970s, during the Carter administration, with passage of the Community Reinvestment Act to stem bank redlining and liberalize lending in order to extend home ownership in lower-income communities. This risk was acknowledged in the Bush administration’s first fiscal-year budget, released in April 2001.
Sadly, these warnings were ignored by Obama and the democrats in Congress.
Maybe this explains why Obama is failing miserably with his economic stimulus plan…
He never understood what the problem was to begin with.
