No, RetiredGuy, this whole mess can't be blamed on the Democrats who have controlled Congress for the last two years.It took a lot longer than that.

The original CRA was enacted under a Democratic President with a Democratic House and Republican Senate. Since that time we have had 20 years of Republican Presidents and 8 years with a Democrat in the White House. Republican George Bush presided for the last eight years. The Republicans have controlled the House for 12 of the last 16 years and the Senate for 10 of the last 16 years.

Could this have been foreseen? Why wasn't anything done? This situation WAS predicted...by Congressional committees, by the financial media, by individual elected politicians, and most importantly by the various regulators who inspected the banks, insurance comapnies and Freddie and Fannie, much in open testimony before Congress!

Why was nothing done? Because those that could change things most easily--the U.S. Congress--were caught in the crosshairs of huge amounts of contributions from the companies who would suffer from a tightening of regulations and their habit of pandering for votes for re-election. We've all seen the disgusting statistics showing that the six members of Congress who initially lead the response to the current crisis had accepted a total of $24 million from the very companies they were supposed to regulate. That's a good example of the influence of special interests. Even our own congresswoman for Florida's 5th District has accepted almost $600,000, the majority from banks, insurance companies and real estate companies. For what? She was the owner of a donut shop before her election to the House. Why are companies throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at her, because she's such a nice lady? Yeah, right!

We've all seen the YouTube videos of members of Congress defending the CRA and Fannie and Freddie. But those shown in the video were all members of the minority party in Congress in 2004. Why didn't the members of the majority party modify the laws or regulations when they clearly could have done so? Because of that pandering for the votes of the low income people who were enjoying the largesse being able to get loans they couldn't possibly repay. I guess the Congress thought that the music would never stop and not havie enough chairs for them to hide behind. No, it should be pinned on members of both parties over many, many years.

Others believe that legislation written primarily by Phil Gramm, a Republican from Texas, in 1999 (signed into law by Clinton), is in large part to blame for the 2008 mortgage crisis. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is perhaps most famous for repealing the Glass-Steagall Act which had established much of the regulation of the national banks. Among other results, the legislation allowed Swiss Bank UBS to purchase several American institutions and begin competing in both commercial and investment banking. Gramm later became a lobbyist for UBS, collecting over $750,000 in fees. UBS alone issued over $18 billion in subprime mortgages, most of which they either sold to Fannie Mae or packaged in mortgage-backed securities which they sold to investors. Gramm was John McCain’s presidential campaign co-chair and his most senior economic adviser from summer 2007 to July 18, 2008. He withdrew after he made the unfortunate statement that Americans were a bunch of "whiners". He still is currently employed as Vice Chairman of UBS, serving as an investment banking "rainmaker".

No, it wasn't just the Democrats and it didn't all just happen in the last couple of years. There are plenty of members of Congress from both parties that can be accused of blame. They all ought to be thrown out of office as soon as possible.