Thursday, October 09, 2008

The Blame Game. By SunshineUnderground

“Let me get this straight. Investment banks and insurance companies run by centimillionaires blow up, and it's the fault of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and poor minorities?” - Daniel Gross

Slate’s Daniel Gross posted a must read earlier this week debunking the myth, put forward by Republicans ( like those at Babalu) that the blame for the financial crisis can be laid entirely at the feet of poor minority homeowners and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Florida, ground zero in the housing crisis documented so well on this blog by gimleteye, garners two mentions, the most important of which concerns Miami:

“…many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.”

Read the whole article. It helps put a lot of what this blog has documented locally into a national context.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This video explains it all..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RZVw3no2A4&feature=iv&annotation_id=event_597487

Pay special attention to the charts and graphs included.. It runs a bit fast, so, feel free to pause it on each screen for the full effect.

Anonymous said...

Slick job. But what political party and its candidates garnered the most money from Wall Street and the banking industry/GSE's during the run up to the crisis... it wasn't the Democrats.

Anonymous said...

Bottom line is this: both parties have been doing a piss-poor job and it's high time the electorate stop buying their garbage and put some fresh faces and fresh ideas into office. At the rate things are going could it really get worse quicker than it already is? The Democrats and Republicans have us right where they want us; one blames the other for X problem, makes some cash, rides it out as long as they can and then the other side pulls the same move. Rinse, repeat. Frankly we're about to hit rock bottom and these people should be BEGGING us to remain in their cozy D.C. offices instead of us ripping at each others' throats because they're a democrat/republican. But sadly we're too easily whipped into a frenzy and would rather point fingers than actually fix anything.

God bless America.

Tom Legrady said...

You might want to pass the word on to Daniel Gross ... centi is a fraction, 1%, one-hundredth. So a centimillionaire has $10,000. even I can meet that requirement.

He's thinking of hecto, as in hactare: a hundred ares. ( an are is 100 square meters, i.e. 10 meters by 10 meters, or 33 feet by 33 feet )

Making a fool of yourself by using prefixes without knowing what they mean puts a BIG dent in your argument, however valid the rest of your comments might be.

Anonymous said...

"A centimillionaire has a net worth of more than 100 million units of currency." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire

But, Wikipedia can be changed, by anyone. You can go edit and change centimillionaire to be hectomillionaire right now. (I already have, and it was changed back.)

There is on-going discussion on Wikipedia whether centimillionaire or hectomillionaire is correct:

"centimillionaire, being someone with 100 million or more. Is this a correct use of the term centimillionaire?? I would have thought a centimillionaire would have a mere $10,000." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Millionaire

Anonymous said...

Wow a picture of fric and frac...