The Fox News Narrative of the Economic Collapse

The right-wing narrative of the economic meltdown is that Clinton facilitated home-ownership through the government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to unqualified borrowers eventually leading to the economic meltdown during the Bush years, and the Democratic Party’s increased regulations on the private sector have caused the delay in recovery. Let’s analyze that.

Fannie Mae was indeed created by a Democrat, FDR, in 1938 to free up capital during the Great Depression. However, it was turned into a publicly traded company, owned by investors in 1968. Two years later, Freddie Mac was created under Nixon, and that also went public in 1989. So while, there is an implicit guarantee of government security because these entities are too big to fail, they are not exactly government run.

Home ownership has been pushed consistently by both parties as the pinnacle of the American Dream ideal. Selling mortgages to unqualified buyers through deceitful means was a result of greedy businessmen and women that were not happy maintaining substantial profit margins, but rather required exponential growth to satisfy their uber-capitalist hunger.

The deregulation and rabid trading of derivatives for short-term gain that peaked during the G.W. Bush years are somehow left out of this Fox News, right-wing narrative. The newer regulations put in place by Democrats were simply meant to try to prevent some of the same reckless investment that led to the collapse that we are now trying to recover from.