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  1. Catherine,

    I know you’re the expert so I wanted to get your
    take on the truth behind what this article is saying
    that someone sent me.
    How much of this do you think if any was a contributing factor
    to the housing bubble?

    Upside Down Economics
    http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5429

    “The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 directed federal regulatory agencies to “encourage” banks and other lending institutions “to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions.

    The real potential of that premise became apparent in the 1990s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) imposed a requirement that mortgage lenders demonstrate with hard data that they were meeting their responsibilities under the Community Reinvestment Act.

    What HUD wanted were numbers showing that mortgage loans were being made to low-income and moderate-income people on a scale that HUD expected, even if this required “innovative or flexible” mortgage eligibility standards.

    In other words, quotas were imposed– and if some people didn’t meet the standards, then the standards need to be changed.”

  2. The financial and economic system is coming apart. In the long run, is this a good thing?

    Our financial system thrives on corruption, so any cop or insider trying to do good would have to act secretly or quickly before retaliation from the Greek & Roman gods (Rothchilds, Rockefellers, etc.) who wield a disproportionate influence might retaliate. The CDS timebomb was obviously set to explode eventually, but this may not have been obvious to all in the 1990s since so many insiders would profit. But this financial crisis is putting at risk those same banking entities that seemed so important to the Greek gods of the recent past. I have a hard time having hatred for many leading political figures, even Dubya, because I do not know what constrains their actions. Are they evil? Or constrained by an evil system? Power corrupts, but our government, businesses, and military are not full of only people with a monolithic desire to serve Satan and Satan only.

    Three more tangible signs of evidence of a society working for actual change.

    1. The Gift of the Internet. Iniital technology created through the Pentagon system. Chomsky once said that the internet’s first designs were not as open as it eventually became. “The Internet” was sold to Big Business as a place where they could further sell products and control information. It was supposed to be another tool of control, like a big crappy AOL (for those that remember what dial-up AOL was first like). On the bad side, the internet has allowed our financial markets even more access to the average citizen’s wealth via banking and online brokers (Jesse James robbed banks because that’s where the money is). But the positives outweigh the bad.

    Catherine has mentioned before about stock market manipulation with pumps-and-dumps. But I remember that one of these pumps and dumps was a company called GLOBAL CROSSING in the late 1990s, responsible for laying most of the fiber to RESIDENTIAL AREAS across the USA. Global Crossing went bankrupt but didn’t this pump and dump allow internet access to the average citizen much faster than a sustainable model would have?

    2. If the corruption was via the biggest banks, the biggest banks are all technically bankrupt now. Citigroup, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers. EVEN ALL POWERFUL GOLDMAN SACHS would be bankrupt now if the government had not guaranteed AIG’s “assets.”

    3. A lot of multibillion dollar scams are being exposed now, Madoff, etc. Swiss banks (one of which owns Enron’s online assets according to Catherine) are being forced to give up information from tens of thousands of accounts to the US government. To my knowledge, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. While the government can use this information to further threaten citizens, the possibility exists that maybe some good guys are putting together collateral for the massive game of “chicken” being played right now. They may lose anyway, but getting financial information from offshore accounts is EXACTLY how a real cop would operate.

    The Gordian knot is almost impossible to untie, but looks like some tugging is going on.

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