The Predators really ARE evil

There are times when the Predator Classes look almost harmless.  After all, they provide us with royal families, investment banks, soldiers all dolled up in useless uniforms, professional sports, churches, armies of lawyers, and much of the rest of the trappings of what we call civilization.

So once in a while, we need a reminders of just how dangerous and how much damage the Predators can do.  Taibbi gets it.

Mortgage Bubble Blamed, Ludicrously, on the Government

The bullshit train just keeps rolling on.

In the ongoing effort to rewrite history and deflect blame from Wall Street for the financial crisis, former U.S. Treasury official and current American Enterprise Institute swine Peter Wallison has issued a lengthy analysis of the mortgage bubble that, surprise, surprise, lays the blame for the crash at the feet of government efforts to expand home ownership to "those who normally would not qualify."

The Washington Times piece about the Wallison study includes the following coda near the top. The emphasis here is mine: "Without waiting for the evidence, many in the political class, particularly those on the left, bought into the argument that the financial crisis was caused by greed."

I'm going to come back to that remarkable line written by senior Cato Institute fellow Richard Rahn, who's just jumped to the very top of my shit list, in a second. But just quickly, the argument goes on to summarize the conclusions in Wallison's study, which is described as a "stronger and more empirically-based" argument, having been done by one of what Rahn calls the "somewhat more sophisticated observers" who didn't just rush to blame the whole thing on greed without waiting for the evidence. 

[snip] 

Plain and simple, the mortgage bubble was caused by the unregulated mass-marketing of mismarked, or fraudulently marked, subprime mortgages to customers who had no idea or only a very dim idea of what they were buying. This was high-tech fraud and stealing, and not just greed but unconscionable, criminal greed on a grand scale.

As for Richard Rahn talking about observers in the "political class" who blamed the crash on greed "without waiting for the evidence," let me just ask this: on the literary totem pole, what could possibly be lower than a flack for an industry-fattened think tank taking a paycheck to defend greed? I guess there are all sorts of creatures in God's kingdom, but man, are some of them ugly. more