Five years after the housing and financial meltdown, self-styled progressives are still peddling their pseudoexplanation: that it was largely the fault of the 1999 repeal of a provision of the New Deal–era Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking. This tale is favored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others of her ilk, who hold the rather absurd view that the United States had free banking between the 1980s and the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010.
One wonders if Warren et al. ever bother to look at the facts, particularly the passage of Glass-Steagall and what, if any, role the repeal actually played in the crisis. Since they never say anything specific, it’s hard to know if this is anything more than an incantation designed to blame the “free [sic] market” and to bolster their case for bureaucratic management of our lives (which they call “the economy”). It takes Herculean ignorance or dishonesty to claim that America had free banking before 2010. Hence, this is a classic confirmation of my observation that no matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom remains.
The crisis began with the housing collapse, a result of government encouragement of unsound lending practices. Financial firms took too much risk with mortgage-backed securities, in part because of moral hazard engendered by government guarantees and partly because bond rating firms were not as independent as was once thought. The limited liability that the investment banks gained when they became corporations may also have amplified moral hazard. There is no good reason to believe that Glass-Steagall, had it remained in effect, would have prevented any of these problems.
Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute fills in the picture when he writes,
In 1992, Congress adopted the ironically named Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act, also known as the GSE Act, giving HUD the authority to administer the legislation’s affordable housing goals. The law required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when they acquired mortgages from lenders, to meet a quota of loans to borrowers who were at or below the median income where they lived. At first, the quota was 30%, but HUD was authorized to raise the quota and over time it did, eventually requiring a quota of 56%.
The result of this and related policies? “At the time of Lehman’s failure [in 2008],” Wallison writes, “half of all mortgages in the U.S.—28 million loans—were subprime or otherwise risky and low-quality. Of these, 74% were on the books of government agencies, principally the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
On their face, these numbers suggest that the government’s housing policy had created the demand for these mortgages, and thus had something to do with Lehman’s failure and the financial crisis. But in recent days nearly all articles have focused on the 26% of mortgages that were the responsibility of the private sector. It is as though the vast majority of the subprime mortgages that the government bought didn’t exist.
Obama and his crowd, by the way, have returned to pressuring lenders to make “affordable” loan to unqualified homebuyers.
For What It's Worth 