I had a part time job while still in high school at a service station, pumping gas, changing oil, etc. That doesn't qualify to claim expertise in oil refinery and the chemistry required to transform crude oil into the various grades of gasoline we buy at the pump. And while licensed real estate agents and brokers may have completed courses in real estate investment, real estate law, real estate development, urban real estate economics, urban fiscal policy, urban public policy and private economic development advanced real estate investment and analysis, I have yet to know one who has had a course in what Clinton had to do with the fall of the housing market in 2008. Which, by the way, was nothing.
The exponential rise of adjustable rate mortgages and Wall Street's ability to bundle these as tranches into mortgage backed securities, with increasingly higher percentages of these mortgages comprising the tranches, while the qualifying criteria for mortgages went out the window, had, in all fairness, nothing to do with anything Bush or Clinton did. It is also safe to say that neither president had any clue as to anything Wall Street was doing or planned to do that led to this recession. Wall Street had been pushing, relentlessly, non-stop, for countless points on deregulating every aspect of the financial market industry, since forever, and, eventually, got enough deregulation passed to a point where they could, basically, print money "until the wheels fell off". And that is exactly what many did and did it exactly up until the wheels did fall off!
And now we're still hearing stories of people who, while shopping for a house in 2007 and early 2008, thought real estate agents had lost their minds by assuring them they could get a mortgage for a home much more expensive, 10's and sometimes 100's of thousands of dollars more than they had budgeted for in spite of the fact the prospective home owners knew, positively, that there was no way they could sustain the monthly payments which, in some cases, were higher that their monthly income. There are many who refused the crazy deals and stayed within their means or just accepted the fact that, perhaps, home ownership just wasn't in their cards, for the time being. Unfortunately, too many accepted.
No top economists, anywhere, saw this coming in 2005, almost no one in 2006 and very few can give evidence that they showed any concern as late as early 2008. But above the top economists, are the top traders and securities whizzes - the tip top Harvard Business minds - the ones who formulated the most noxious mortgage backed derivatives as only the best could, their complexity was that enormous - and they did it because that's why mummy and daddy paid all that money to send them to Harvard in the first place: to learn how to rape and pillage the entire nation and get away with it.
While the events leading up to the current recession happened entirely within the scope of the George W Bush presidency, one can hardly blame it on the moron who, on May 1, 2003, became the first sitting President to make an arrested landing in a fixed-wing aircraft on an aircraft carrier when he arrived at the USS Abraham Lincoln to make his "live", televised "Mission Accomplished" speech which was followed by 99% of all of the combat casualties since the U.S invaded Iraq.
