Paul Sperry in The Great American Bank Robbery implicitly points out that the film, "Inside Job" does a job on Wall Street without mentioning the culpability of gubmnt bureaucrats and regulators in the financial crisis of 2006-9 [disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of the book from the publisher]. He makes this argument explicitly elsewhere.
Some of his key points about the film:
WHAT'S WRONG is how his film never mentions the real culprits in the crisis, which were the political zealots at HUD who slapped the affordable housing mandates on Fannie and Freddie, and how those same culprits have returned to the scene of their crime and are making the same reckless housing policies under Obama.
WHAT'S WRONG is how this filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, personally gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Obama and Dems and even met with Obama while pretending he DOESN’T have a political agenda.
Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, the House banking panel chief, is lionized in the film as the conscience of regulators, when in fact he was one of the architects of the financial disaster. He insisted there was nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and opposed tougher oversight.
The film claims minority borrowers were "put into" subprime loans by "predatory lenders" such as Countrywide Financial. Yet it was HUD that put Countrywide into the subprime business.
After the Clinton HUD threatened to investigate Countrywide for lending discrimination, the mortgage lender signed a government contract agreeing to relax its lending standards and increase the number of minority loans. Countrywide soon became the biggest subprime lender. If Ferguson had done his research, he would have found that HUD was the biggest predatory lender of all.
The banks were indeed culpable for having executed a very successful (and, for the most part, legal) end run around the capital requirements of Basel I and Basel II. But the regulators and politicians were at least as culpable for all the things they did, too. In that regard, I highly recommend reading Arnold Kling's "Not What They Had in Mind," which is required reading in my course on the financial crisis .
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