MORE ON NOCERA'S "THE BIG LIE"

David Cay Johnston has done a lot of good work looking under the hood of the American financial industry and wrote this last November:

Wendy Edelberg, who was the commission’s executive director, said on Friday that “while you can never predict all panics, the flip side is this crisis was caused by human actions and was avoidable.”

She showed with hard numbers that, contrary to the nonsense being peddled by Wall Street and the politicians it finances, the meltdown was a Wall Street creation.


Edelberg presented charts showing that loan delinquencies “were lower by an order of magnitude” for government-sponsored Fannie and Freddie than for Wall Street’s mortgage-backed securities. Delinquencies at one point were 15 percent for Fannie and Freddie versus 40 percent for Wall Street.

I then began reading The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report and found this about Fannie and Freddie on page xxvi:

We conclude that these two entities contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary
cause. Importantly, GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value
throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses that were central to the financial crisis.

On page 218, there is a chart that compares mortgage delinquencies made by the GSE's (Fannie and Freddie) to other market segments: