The Cause of the Current Crisis

In one word: Obama.

On July 6, 1994, Obama, along with other lawyers for ACORN sued Citibank for discriminatory practices in making mortgage loans. They claimed CitiGroup was discriminating against inner city blacks by not making mortgages to those living in certain parts of the city without hefty conditions.

CitiGroup, as any business, most probably had done due diligence work to figure who their high-risk customers were, and who were not. As it turns out, inner city blacks were in the high-risk category and were more often than not, denied loans.

As a result of the lawsuit, Citi was forced to make these toxic loans (as they are now called). The "predatory lending" practices was a direct result of the Obama & Co. lawsuit.

With Citi in the business of making these sub-prime loans, federal pressure mounted on Fannie and Freddie as well. Soon, they were backing billions of below-par loans. Enter the creation of the perfect storm.

In the 90s, Clinton put in place certain policies that helped devastate the country in 2000 and 2001. He systematically dismantled the intelligence gathering ability of our country, and worked to reduce our military strength.

Simultaneously, he failed to decisively act when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, our embasies in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.

The stock market crash after the dot com bubble burst in 2000 was no one's fault but the Market's. George Bush inherited this chaos along with the seeds for the perfect storm.

As a direct result of the reduced intelligence gathering abilities the US possessed, terrorists were able to successfully attack the World Trade Center in 2001. After the 9/11 attacks, the stock markets further plummeted. In order to try to stabilize the markets from the 1-2 punch of the dot com bust and the 9/11 attacks, the Feds lowered short term interest rates for banks.

This in turn allowed banks to lower their interest rates to customers. People started getting giddy with credit.

All of a sudden, people who were at one point of time unable to get a loan for a house, because of the Obama/Citibank lawsuit, were now able to get more house than they could afford. Exotic marketing schemes like ARM mortgages abounded.

Finally, what Citibank and others had once wisely known and tried to prevent happened. The people who they knew could not make their mortgage payments, but were forced to lend money to by Obama, stopped making their payments.

As more and more houses entered morgage defaults, distressed financial institutions had no option but to close their doors.

Ultimately, we find ourselves in the mess that we are in now.

If Obama had not sued Citibank to accept these toxic loans in the first place, our economy would be going very well right now.

And of course, the majority voted him in.

Think of that as you surf to another site... it's like asking a drunk to mind the liquor store.