Courtesy of Pam Martens
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is back to pedaling his Big Lie that Wall Street banks were not responsible for the financial crash of 2008 or the ensuing housing crash. This time he’s told such a doozie of a lie that there is no longer any doubt that he’s on a mission to restore Wall Street’s credibility, even if he has to rewrite the history of the financial crash and every official report that’s been published on it.
The latest Big Lie from Krugman appeared in yesterday’s print edition but first appeared in the digital edition on Monday under a different headline, “Have Zombies Eaten Bloomberg’s and Buttigieg’s Brains?” In a very clever sleight of hand, Krugman is complaining, correctly so, about the fact that presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has adopted a right-wing mantra in attempting to place the blame for the housing bust, that accompanied the Wall Street collapse, on liberals who “caused the crisis by forcing poor innocent bankers to lend money to people of color….” (Krugman’s complaint about Buttigieg is that he’s too obsessed with the $23 trillion national debt – a significant part of which, of course, resulted from attempting to recover from the Wall Street collapse.)
As Krugman asserts his superiority on facts versus Bloomberg, he throws out this whopper of a lie about the 2008 financial crash:
“The surge in bad loans came neither from government-sponsored agencies nor from regulated banks, but from unregulated mortgage originators.”
Every official report on the Wall Street collapse has revealed the following: that Wall Street banks were fueling the subprime mortgage loans because they wanted the fat underwriting fees to bundle the loans and securitize them. Some Wall Street banks, like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, even used their insider knowledge of just how bad the loans were to bet against them (make short bets). The crisis was further deepened by the fact that these same Wall Street banks were paying for rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to give triple-A ratings to securitizations that the banks knew were likely to collapse.
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