Thursday, January 27, 2011

Phil Angelides' Panel Makes Its Report

The Housing Bubble was an amazing thing. It was basically an enormous Ponzi scheme; a virus that seized hold of the entire economy. People made so much money off of it that no one wanted it to stop.

Partisanship seems to dictate who one holds the most responsible for the crisis, which is unfortunate, because not everyone bears the same blame. Currently, the GOP blames Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and poor people who wanted to move on up (like Riverside County Hispanics) the most, but these folks weren't in charge. Wall Street was in charge. If it wasn't for the revolution in securitization, none of this would have happened. And good regulation could have stopped it. Look at Canada: they never saw the Housing Bubble at all. Good regulations, particularly outlawing HELOCs, ensured that even bubble-susceptible Texas largely-escaped damage.

The malefactors escaped with the loot, and they will do this again, maybe with commodities like oil or minerals, because it was such a lucrative, lucrative thing to do:
The first full-scale analysis of the factors that led to the worst economic crash in 80 years, the report chronicles subprime mortgage lenders' issuance of "liars' loans" to millions of unqualified borrowers, how Wall Street repackaged them into exotic securities and how ratings agencies stamped them with phony Triple A ratings.

Federal regulatory agencies failed to police the runaway market, topped by the Federal Reserve Board's "pivotal failure" to regulate subprime mortgage lenders' issuance of a flood of mortgages to marginal homebuyers, the panel found. It said that key policymakers lacked a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw and that, at the height of the crisis, federal officials pressed the huge, government-sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take on more risk, heightening taxpayer losses when they collapsed.

"There were warning signs. The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done," said Phil Angelides, the commission's chair. "If we accept this notion, it will happen again."

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