This shows they just don’t get much more dishonest than Michael Bloomberg! Despite Bloomberg’s intimate familiarity with financial markets, he choose to spin this Republican Fairy Tale, and mislead his listeners, All to protect George W. Bush from any accountability.
BY J. EDWARD MORENO
Former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro (D) criticized presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg for statements he made while he was mayor of New York City in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis.
“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’
“And then Congress got involved, local elected officials, as well, and said ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to go get credit.' And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like,” he continued.
Though the fact that banks approved mortgages to otherwise ineligible creditors did lead to the 2008 recession, redlining discriminated against creditors based on where they lived, and subsequently, their demographic, and the practice was banned in the 1970s.
I’ve always found this particular zombie lie particularly galling. It protects the real criminals on Wall Street, like Bloomberg’s cronies, while scapegoating poor folks, especially poor black folks.
Bloomberg isn’t anyone I’d trust running the nation’s economic policies. He shouldn’t be let anywhere near the levers of power. Quite simply Bloomberg isn’t honest enough for us to trust to tell Americans the truth.
And this was the second Bloomberg zombie lie that came to the surface today. After he claimed he inherited the Stop and Frisk policy from his predecessor.
MIKE BLOOMBERG CLAIMS HE CUT STOP-AND-FRISK BY 95 PERCENT — AFTER INCREASING IT SEVENFOLD