# Substantially increase by at least $440 billion, the financial commitment made by the government sponsored enterprises involved in the secondary mortgage market, specifically targeted toward the minority market;

# Launching twenty-five different local initiatives across the nation, geared toward eliminating the specific homeownership barriers faced by minority families in those communities”

The list goes on at:

The speech where Bush is standing with reps from Freddie and Fannie in 2001 (or 2002) is no longer on the White House gov. site, but it was nothing less than a “spread the wealth” speech.

The government has a great responsiblility for what is happening now [and I don't just mean this], which makes me wonder why people are looking to them to solve the problem by printing more money and raising the debt on taxpayers.

If we didn’t have the massive debt and spending from the Bush years and the yearly deficit of 450B accruing every year, with the bailout 1T,, we may have been better able to deal with a crisis. Also, all that spending that was done, yielded little to show for it, in terms of investment in our deteriorating infrastructure or country.

Trying to blame Fannie and Freddy or the CRA for everything is just a Republican talking point, and if you have any brains you’ll investigate and find that it was just part of the problem, and that the Fanny/Freddy involvement in risky loans started in 2004 under Bush, when his appointee said they were “meeting the (private) market” who were making these loans.

The problem occured with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999.
It allowed the banks to consolidate financial services and investment services, something the people who lived through the Great Depression, figured was part of the problem causing banks to collapse back then.
This allowed credit default swaps to emerge as a hugely profitable scam for the banks.
The more mortgages they could sell the more credit default swaps they could offer and thus sell them up the line everyone making money off them.
They knew they coud just pass off the riskier loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after collecting their fees on them by packaging the bad loans with a bunch of approved loans because the same bill reduced the amount of regulators to oversee the program.
After the loans were passed off to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the banks would make money by trading the mortgage credit default swaps, which are similar to insurance on loans.

Meanwhile, as gas prices quadrupled sending the living expenses of American soaring, the GOP enacted legislation to increase the minimum payments on revolving credit accounts.
What did this do?
Cut spending as people started to struggle even more with debt and their expenses. This started the chain reaction of people not being able to pay their bills and eventually losing their homes to what?? … that is right to the foreclosures you mentioned. When the foreclosures first started to grow, anyone claiming the economy was in bad shape were denounced as “doom and gloom libs” by the right.

Foreclosures continued to grow, causing property values to fall. The lower property value made it impossible for people to refinance their ARMS and get the full value of the ARM they previously held, because their property no longer assessed at that value. This created the “people who could not afford their loans” as you people keep crying about.

Now as the foreclosures mounted, people started calling on their default swaps to be paid out. This left the banks writing them extremely undercapitalized. As banks start to get closer to being undercapitalized, their options of the types of loans they can make to make profit becomes very limited so they stop making certain types of loans.
Couple that with the banks that are in good shape scared to loan money to other banks, for fear that they might be a bad investment, you have credit freeze, and jobs loss.

The more jobs lost the worse consumer confidence gets, and the more spending falls, causing more job loss and more forclosures and property values falling even more dragging other investments and investor confidence down with them.

If you are going to comment on something, you may want to start researching the entire story, rather than some half-truth butchered version created by the GOP to point the blame elsewhere.

Wanna know whose responsible? Barny Frank (D) would be in the top three on that list. Add to that all those politicians (mostly Democrat) who refused to listen to people like John McCain who tried to tell them 3 years ago that Fannie and Freddie were headed for a major meltdown.