It's not at all surprising to see the Republican candidates for president pushing the myth that the whole housing boom and bust wasn't at all the banks' fault, but instead the undeserving unwashed who took the loans. But, really, the supposedly liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg should know better than to peddle that crap.
BLOOMBERG: I hear your complaints. 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 so sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them, and they wouldn't have had 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. ... Having said all of that, we've just got to focus on how we move and get the mortgage business and construction going rather than how we got here and who did it. It's fun and it's cathartic, I dunno, it's entertaining to go and to blame people and look to the past, but it doesn't do anything for the future. And most of the protesters down there are complaining, I think they should be out there trying to change the world and make it better.
Yeah, not true. The subprime loans that the private banks and lenders who drove the housing bubble with all those subprime crap loans are not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 law Bloomberg is referencing. That's just for a start. Read that whole link from Paul Krugman for the full debunking.
It'll make Bloomberg's 1 percent buddies happy to hear him stick up for them, but it's still a lle.