Bloomberg slaps down #OWS: Blame Congress for mortgage crisis, not banks

A refreshing, rare burst of truth from New York City’s Mayor:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it’s not the “big banks,” but Congress.

Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.

“But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.”

Nice to see you join the Occupy Truth movement, Mr. Mayor. A lot of us have been saying that same thing for years.

Ed Morrissey, in a must-read, echoes Bloomberg’s point that “Occupiers” Β are pushing for the exact same lax lending ‘standards’ that helped get us into this mess in the first place:

It’s even more important toΒ not make the same mistakeΒ again, which is exactly what the OWS crowd wants.Β  They want Congress to intervene even more heavily to lower lending standards as a policy of β€œfairness,” which is exactly what Congress did in the late 1990s, and which started the housing bubble that nearly destroyed the financial sector in 2008.

Unfortunately, as we have seen time and time again throughout history, liberals never learn from their mistakes. Β  Reason being that they hold a deeply flawed mindset on the exact role of government in the lives of the American people, and to admit their gross mistakes – especially on economic and social policy – would be to acknowledge internally that that line of thinking, er, leads us down a very dangerous path. Β But, of course, they’d never, ever admit to that …

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