Bloomberg once blamed banks making loans to black Americans as the cause of the 2008 financial crash

[Galraedia]

Over a decade ago as Wall Street financial giants verged on collapse, Mike Bloomberg, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who was then the mayor of New York City, tried diagnosing the cause of the economic chaos.

In newly resurfaced comments from a Georgetown University forum in September 2008, he pointed a finger toward the ending of a discriminatory practice against black Americans known as redlining.

"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone," the billionaire said at the time. "Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"

Redlining refers to a historical government-backed practice designed to segregate black Americans into separate neighborhoods and bar them from access to home loans.

Read more: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bloomberg-blamed-black-americans-loans-2008-financial-crash-banks-candidate-2020-2-1028903643

[Hassin Bin Sober]

1. Unbelievable.

Well not really.

[underthematrix]

2. Bloomberg's penance is gonna be expensive. He can afford it.

He's my second choice

[uponit7771]

4. Soooooo...CP5, racial profiling with no apology for it and now this !? How in the hell did

... Bloomberg get elected mayor of NY ?!

Jus, wow

[SWBTATTReg]

5. Bloomberg didn't do the redlining nor create the mortgaged backed bonds ... bad banks and...

bad insurance companies did, in trying to write more and more bad bonds.

[jmg257]

6. No, he didn't. He said ending redlining was "the start", and bad practices of banks & wall street

were a big part of the problem.

"And then Congress got involved — local elected officials, as well — and said, 'Oh that's not fair, these people should be able to get credit.' And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn't as good as you would like."

Politicians LOVED to say things like: 'the housing market is up!' & 'More 1st time home buyers then ever!'

“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html


Watch The Big Short

"The problem back then, amply illustrated in The Big Short by idiot estate agents and greedy bankers, was that the American banks were lending huge amounts of money to people who had little hope of repaying it if anything went wrong with the housing market.

The Miami stripper portrayed in The Big Short, who owned five houses and a condo, was perfectly plausible as a symbol of the madness of the time. They called such lending “subprime”, where even the jobless and the fraudulent could get a dream home."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/the-big-short-movie-chronicling-the-craziness-that-caused-the-last-credit-crunch-feels-uncomfortably-a6828346.html

[Squinch]

7. Oh, FFS, no he didn't. How many times are people going to push this same nonsense

article with the headline that has no relation to the actual thing Bloomberg said?