Good to hear from you again.

You must have missed an earlier post of mine regarding the CRA.

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/christianpolitics/2008/10/the-unjust/

There’s a link to a businessweek article with details on how the CRA had little or nothing to do with the problem.

Since I wrote that blog, I heard a program on NPR that put the final piece in place.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90327686

The REAL cause was the unregulated free market in its simplest and most elegant form – supply and demand.

Third world countries like China and India were making a lot of money selling stuff to us ($70 Trillion!). They needed a safe place to put that money. Greenspan discouraged them from putting it in US Treasuries, so they decided that the next safest investment was US mortgages. The problem was that the demand of money looking for investments exceeded the supply of qualified mortgages. So unregulated brokers came up with more and more creative ways to write riskier and riskier mortgages, and still could not satisfy the international demand for these securities.

While everyone was making money, it seemed like a great idea. Even the brokers themselves knew that it wouldn’t last, but some were in so deep they couldn’t extract themselves.

It’s just like trapping monkeys. You hollow out a coconut. Tie it to a tree. Drill a small hole that a monkey can just fit his hand through, but not get his fist out. Then drop in a piece of banana. Come back the next day and you will have caught a monkey because they will allow themselves to be captured rather than let go of that banana.

I’ll comment on the bible references in another post.

Jeff

The Kindom of God is “Christ in us.” It is Jesus. It is opposite of the world view. It is light in darkness. It is in no way a new social order here on earth. It is the works of Jesus, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, people being delivered from denomic strongholds, prostitutes being freed, drug addics coming clean, adulterer’s being heald. People turning from their wicked ways and confessing their sin and belief in Christ. That’s the kingdom that Jesus spoke about. Do a word search on “Kingdom” and read all the verse in the new testiment that kingdom pops up in. It is quite different Jeff then what you are suggesting

#2 We will not have less influence going forward. Need proof, the dollars is strengthing rapidly. Why? We are the only currency anyone really trusts. The economies of the rest of the world are imploding. Russia is in free fall. For as bad as we are doing they are significantly worse off. Their stock market is off 80% or more. We are still the wealthiest, strongest economy in the world. We’ve hit a bump caused by the community reinvestment act that forced freedie and fannie into a terrible position and leaned heavily on commercial banks to do the same. We’ll get out of it like we always do.

#3 We are still a center right country. Trust me. Conservitism is not dead. Staring down a barrel as you discribed it but the barrel was created by a socialist program.

I wouldn’t consider the banks nationalized. The gov’t bought shares in privite institutions. What happens when everything recovers and they sell these shares and make billions? The tax payers will have been made whole and we all will be wondering why we didn’t have the forsite to invest portions of social security in the market at the same time. (opps some did have this forsite, they were called dangerous and “Risky.”)

#4 The conservitive fantasy which you speak is responsible for the creation of the wealthest nation that has ever been. Some fantasy huh?

The gov’t should have stepped aside and let the market do its magic. The problems that occured was due to the gov’t NOT doing it’s job. They created the mess via the community reinvestment act. That was not free market capitalism. Have you wondered why we have no public view of the villians in this story? The dems wanted the heads of Enron, Gobal, etc in the early 2000’s. Why no lynch mob now? BECAUSE IT”S THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This has nothing to do with a self regulation free market. It’s because the dems created a program that WAS NOT a free market program. Now don’t get me wrong, many bank heads made stupid, stupid mistakes. They should have found a way to say no to lending pratices that were absurd. Zero money down and loaning 125% of the value of the home were insane. They forgot their history lessons from 1925 – 1929 that caused the great depression. But, The community reinvestment program forced it down the markets throat.

#5 Your closing returns to a thought that God wants a social order here on earth that is some how political….again you are deviating greatly from the bible. Read revelations about your one world gov’t that you seam to be speaking of. Trust me, as a Christian, I am in no hurry for this to occur.