AmericanPapist Comments
Both the Democrats and the Republicans have blood on their hands with this economic mess.
The only voice of wisdom this campaign season was Ron Paul. He's the only one who predicted this mess, and the only one to identify it's cause: the Federal Reserve.
Sadly, the media marginalized him as a quack then; turns out they need him more than ever.
Check out www.lewrockwell.com for some great daily analysis about all of this.
And this was the best analysis of the causes of the crisis you could fine? Nice.
McCain and Obama: Two wings of the same bird of prey.
When will the majority in the country accept and act on the knowledge that our liberties are gone thanks to two spineless political parties with an unquenchable thirst to intervene in our lives?
I'm glad you posted this video again, because it really got me thinking after the first time you posted it. While I think there may be some merit to saying the CRA may have contributed in some way to ramping up subprime mortgage availability, I disagree with the videos conclusions (and I disagree with yours as well, nothing against you though!). As any good debater would say, "it does not follow." Correlation does not equal causation, and thus in this case the staunch anti-government regulation advocates are making a false leap in telling this story. In order to really evaluate the claims of this video, we need a comparison case where the CRA had no influence or impact. I think we're seeing that comparison case right now in Europe, as banks are now failing across the world (some of which were not directly involve in the American mortgage markets). The reality is, the whole world's banking industry got caught up in lending that was divorced from the fundamentals and thought they could share risk by dumping bad loans into large funds. The problem is that when their predictions of loan defaults (say expectations that 10% of subprimes would default) were off even by small margins (i.e. the number of loan defaults was 15% or 20% instead of 10%) you get a massive loss of money and banking collapse. After much reflection, and much reading (because I'm a datahead and love to get to the truth) I've come to the conclusion that, in this case, had certain regulations been in place to prevent the degrees of leveraging we have seen (and assets that were in fact imaginary) this crisis could have been avoided. I would love to say that our financial markets are as worthy as our Catholic faith in application of a set of principals that always apply and can be adhered to dogmatically (such as "government regulation is always bad") but it's just not the case. Saying, as Ron Paul does, that government got us into this and the solution is ALWAYS to have ZERO government regulation and involvement (the debatable effect of the CRA not withstanding) I think is wrong and even dangerous. At the very least, a much better argument than the one in this video is going to have to be presented, it just doesn't pass the red face test.
Here's a BusinessWeek writer patiently explaining why the CRA has little to do with this (click 'Homepage'). Whether there is some relation is an interesting question. Claiming that the CRA was the primary cause of the housing bubble and the current crisis is ludicrous.
Even my libertarian, Econ. Ph.D. roommate argues that regulation is needed in the financial industry--the theoretical term for the problems that need to be mitigated by regulation is asymmetric information. Of course, the tricky part is whether the regulations the government produces will actually be effective ones--here, the libertarians have a point that the regulation that actually gets in to law will tend to be imperfect or worse.
The kind of regulation economists call for in the financial sector can increase market transparency--helping to deal with that information problem.
I can see influences of both Democratic and Republican policies on this crisis, and we should try to understand them all. But don't settle for oversimplified answers.
Ultimately abortion is the cause. Yes it may sound strange at first however how many millions of babies have been and are being killed? God isnt just going to let that slide.
I don't know if abortion is the cause "ultimately."
I would say, however, that our careless (they call it "carefree") economy is connected to the culture of death in America, absolutely.
The cause of both, however, is the underlying premise of throw-away consumerism.
When everything around is is designed to be thrown away (sadly, even our liturgy has succumbed to this if you think about the past 40 years!), why not life too?
Good job circulating the video. It certainly seems to make sense.
You can fact check everything in this video. There isn't anything misleading, and that's scary.
For the Obamabots out there, it's expected that you should sound like Luke Skywalker screaming at Darth Vader in Cloud City, "No... NOOOOO!!!! IT'S NOT TRUE!!!!"
You've already closed your eyes to his stance in opposition of all of the Catholic Church's non-negotiables, why not on the fact that he and the Dems were largely the reason why Fannie Mae got away with muder (well, the suicides of many people who lost their homes to foreclosure anyway).
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