Peter Wallison: Wall Street's Gullible Occupiers - WSJ.com

And the beat goes on... the blame game is rampant on the pages of both the NYTimes and the WSJ. Are some real leaders available who can brush aside this noise and get on with moving this country in a healthy direction?

TeamObama has failed his rabid liberal supporters and the country at the same time. We need some real leadership. Where is it? We need a groundswell of sanity, not partisan ideological talking heads.

Congress has also failed us and shown America its great need for people who truly show by their actions that they put the country first and are willing to make the tough choices that will lead to recovery. The answer is certainly not more government spending and exorbitant debt. I consider Congress the only place this can be remedied as I read the Constitution.

"There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government's housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis."

Then there is this:

"Research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae (now a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute) has shown that 27 million loans—half of all mortgages in the U.S.—were subprime or otherwise weak by 2008. That is, the loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or were loans with no or low down payments, no documentation, or required only interest payments.Of these, over 70% were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie or some other government agency or government-regulated institution. Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from."

If true, government is clearly to blame for instigating the sub-prime mess by the policies enacted by Congress and the administration.