Now, our far lefters may think this means nothing because Hillary is not an implacable enemy of Wall Street. She is too sensible and competent for that. This speech, however, confirmed Wall Street, never a friend, as an implacable enemy of Hillary Clinton.
Please note that in 2007 the Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress. All financial legislation passed was to benefit business and was deeply flawed by highly irresponsible and ideologically extreme anti-regulation bias. Hillary was not in a position to force the financial industry to do anything at all. All she could do in the face of impending crisis was go to them and try to talk them into bridling their greed for their own good as well as the nation's. She did call for a long list of needed changes that would have prevented the 2008 crash if they had been made.
Hillary's personal indictment of Wall Street below, however, is generally quite similar to with Elizabeth Warren's positions. This speech did make very clear to them that, if Hillary were elected President, she would do everything she could to reattach the regulatory leash that the financial industry had slipped out of under reaganomics, as well as to restore and introduce many, many other regulations on business.
Now, who's exactly to blame for the housing crisis? Well, that's always a question that the press and people ask and I think there's plenty of blame to go around.
Responsibility belongs to mortgage lenders and brokers, who irresponsibly lowered underwriting standards, pushed risky mortgages, and hid the details in the fine print.
Responsibility belongs to the Administration and to regulators, who failed to provide adequate oversight, and who failed to respond to the chorus of reports that millions of families were being taken advantage of.
Responsibility belongs to the rating agencies, who woefully underestimated the risks involved in mortgage securities.
And certainly borrowers share responsibility as well. Homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads. Speculators who were busy buying two, three, four houses to sell for a quick buck don't deserve our sympathy.
But finally, responsibility also belongs to Wall Street, which not only enabled but often encouraged reckless mortgage lending. Mortgage lenders didn't have balance sheets big enough to write millions of loans on their own. So Wall Street originated and packaged the loans that common sense warned might very well have ended in collapse and foreclosure. [Some people might say Wall Street only helped to distribute risk. I believe Wall Street shifted risk away from people who knew what was going on onto the people who did not.
Wall Street may not have created the foreclosure crisis, but Wall Street certainly had a hand in making it worse.
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