New Hillary Ad: Trump wanted US Housing Crisis to occur for Personal Gain

The charge by Hillary, carried by partisan pseudo newspaper USA Today, discusses the housing bubble burst that began late in the George W. Bush administration and completely crashed around the end of Obama’s first term. Clinton sought to denigrate Trump for investing in that down market, but it did not seem to stick.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is airing an attack ad accusing Donald Trump of “root[ing] for the real estate crash,” while ignoring that many of Clinton’s own top corporate donors were implicated in helping to cause the subprime-mortgage crisis and the roots of the crisis, many argue, trace back to Bill Clinton’s administration.

“The man who could be our next president was rooting for it to happen,” it says over a picture of Trump sitting in an ornately decorated room.
The video then features audio of Trump from 2006 stating, “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy. If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know, you could make a lot of money.”

The Trump remarks come from a 2006 audiobook session from Trump University, where the billionaire was speaking as a real estate businessman and responding to a question about “gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.”

Trump’s comments came in the context of explaining how he himself was “in a good cash position,” meaning he’d made wise investments as opposed to others in the same business, and “If you’re in a good cash position — which I’m in a good cash position today — then people like me would go in and buy like crazy.”

Trump was making a logical statement about purchasing potentially valuable real estate at low prices, which is the baseline goal of the real estate business. This is opposed to some of Clinton’s own top donors, who were implicated in the crisis and had to pay major settlements to the government for their roles.

In 2013, former Sen. Phil Gramm, (R-TX), explained in the Wall Street Journal that the roots of the financial crisis trace back to so-called affordable-housing goals established by Bill Clinton’s administration, which “led to a massive increase in risky, subprime mortgages.”

Clinton successfully drafted Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the commercial banking system into his affordable housing efforts. “It did so by exploiting a minor provision in a 1977 housing bill, the Community Reinvestment Act, that simply required banks to meet local credit needs,” they wrote.

Effective in January 1993, the 1992 housing bill required Fannie and Freddie to make 30% of their mortgage purchases affordable-housing loans. The quota was raised to 40% in 1996, 42% in 1997, and in 2000 the Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the quota raised to 50%. The Bush administration continued to raise the affordable-housing goals. Freddie and Fannie dutifully met those goals each and every year until the subprime crisis erupted.

So the housing bubble began due to a Clinton policy of requiring banks to loan money to unqualified and underqualified candidates in order to increase the rate of home ownership, regardless of the wisdom of such an action. Banks that refused faced dire consequences, and when the inevitable crash hit, millions lost their homes and millions more lost the value that had existed in their homes. Trump, who made his comment in 2006, actually seems prescient in recognizing that the actions of the federal government were unsustainable, made a very logical suggestion, which is to buy low and sell high, and that a strong cash position allows that to happen. There is nothing outrageous about Trumps comment, in fact it is simple financial wisdom.

On the other hand, Hillary fails to mention the Whitewater scam, which was also designed to loan money to property owners who would not be able to maintain payments, and then to repossess the properties if only one payment was missed. The Clintons ultimately were not prosecuted for the illegal and dishonest Whitewater real estate activities, but two of their partners in the deal ended up serving time in a federal penitentiary for their role in the program.

Hillary continues to look worse and worse when trying to tar Trump, and her long history of dishonesty and lying will haunt her as she tries to deal with a candidate who is not afraid to call her out and demand accountability for her previous actions. The mainstream media outlets such as USA Today will keep working to get her elected, but that may not be enough to overcome the tawdry history and negatives that Clinton is dragging behind her.

Source: breitbart.com