Obama Drowning Business in a Sea of Red Tape

Gustav said:
hahaha
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Not at all.
New technology wasn't introduced by the free market.

A new method of processing, that was 180 degrees from existing regulations, was mandated by government regulation, and then they took YEARS to come up with the STANDARD that met the regulation, thus freezing software sales and effectively kicking a bunch of companies in the balls.

They did so without regard for the impact on the people in the industry.

Why you think that's a GOOD thing is beyond me.

But you know what?

It doesn't surprise me in the least that neither you nor Joe care about thousands of regular working people being screwed by the government as long as you think it's for the "greater good"

I only hope that Karma is working and that both of you get bent over by the Feds one day.

LOL
 
adoucette said:
Not at all.
New technology wasn't introduced by the free market.

A new method of processing, that was 180 degrees from existing regulations, was mandated by government regulation, and then they took YEARS to come up with the STANDARD that met the regulation, thus freezing software sales and effectively kicking a bunch of companies in the balls.

They did so without regard for the impact on the people in the industry.

Why you think that's a GOOD thing is beyond me.

But you know what?

It doesn't surprise me in the least that neither you nor Joe care about thousands of regular working people being screwed by the government as long as you think it's for the "greater good"

I only hope that Karma is working and that both of you get bent over by the Feds one day.

LOL
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Check 21 legislation does not happen over night nor in a vacuum. The technology transends industries. And therefore it needs a common platform with common standards - hence the law. Those standards are developed over years with input from various industries.

The unpleasant fact for you is that while your company was not prepared for this legislation, others were and they took advantage of it. If others could do it, there is no excuse other than incompetence for your company not to have done it.
 
adoucette said:
Regardless, the government should have worked with the EXISTING industry, so we could have tooled up for the changes before they publically anounced it and thus dried up our sales of existing products.

The many year delay between the announcement of the new way of doing check processing and the publication of the ANSI standard that allowed it (4 years) is what led these companies to go under. I worked for Carreker at the time and we had 600 employees in 2001. By 2004 we were down to 200 (and no raises/bonuses). We didn't make it through 2005.
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You evince a troubling obliviousness to how ANSI (and standards bodies in general) actually work - which is exactly by soliciting participation from interested parties (public and private) and making decisions based on a consensus thereof. That's exactly why the process took 4 years, and why Carreker has no grounds to complain at being surprised by the outcome, or excluded from the process. Carreker had as much opportunity as anyone to influence the outcome of the standards process, and to monitor and prepare for its results - that it apparently failed to do so, despite an evidently huge stake in such, is an indictment of Carreker and not the standards process. Supposing your characterization of this stuff is even accurate - I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't have tracked the standards body's progress, if not actually participated directly, and expect that their decline had more to do with poor management of the strategic response to such.

And as far as I can tell, Carreker did indeed make it past 2005 - to be acquired by CheckFree in 2007. Which was in turn acquired by Fiserv, which remains a highly-profitable enterprize. Looks to me like the industry overall is doing just fine and has no problems with the standards - it's just Carreker that screwed up and got eaten by superior competitors.

Moreover, the whole line about standards processes is irrelevant to the issue of "regulations." This is not an example of a government agency imposing restrictions from on-high to limit private behavior, but of a standards body bringing all interested players together to develop common standards - which are a requirement for the industry in question to function, since a fragmented space of competing proprietary practices would not work. The government basically enables that by lending its weight to the result.
 
joepistole said:
Those standards are developed over years with input from various industries.
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It's more than "input." The standards body is little more than a forum for interested industry players to come together and settle on a consensus.

joepistole said:
The unpleasant fact for you is that while your company was not prepared for this legislation, others were and they took advantage of it. If others could do it, there is no excuse other than incompetence for your company not to have done it.
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As someone whose job involves following and participating in the development of various standards, it looks to me like Carreker simply blew it (supposing adoucette's characterizations of the scenario are accurate). My guess is that they were making money off of implementing old standards, and failed to be proactive about keeping up with the industry. Or maybe they did indeed track that standard and participate, but simply failed to get their way, and didn't have a suitable strategy to respond to that.

Anyway, the complaints about standards processes here sound a lot like complaints that the government shouldn't have passed the various laws and enabled the various standards that created automobile transport, because this put the existing horse-and-buggy industry out of business. A big part of progress, especially in a market system, is exactly the occasional destruction and absorption of "existing industry" in favor of newer, better industry.
 
quadraphonics said:
You evince a troubling obliviousness to how ANSI (and standards bodies in general) actually work - which is exactly by soliciting participation from interested parties (public and private) and making decisions based on a consensus thereof. That's exactly why the process took 4 years, and why Carreker has no grounds to complain at being surprised by the outcome, or excluded from the process. Carreker had as much opportunity as anyone to influence the outcome of the standards process, and to monitor and prepare for its results - that it apparently failed to do so, despite an evidently huge stake in such, is an indictment of Carreker and not the standards process. Supposing your characterization of this stuff is even accurate - I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't have tracked the standards body's progress, if not actually participated directly, and expect that their decline had more to do with poor management of the strategic response to such.

And as far as I can tell, Carreker did indeed make it past 2005 - to be acquired by CheckFree in 2007. Which was in turn acquired by Fiserv, which remains a highly-profitable enterprize. Looks to me like the industry overall is doing just fine and has no problems with the standards - it's just Carreker that screwed up and got eaten by superior competitors.

Moreover, the whole line about standards processes is irrelevant to the issue of "regulations." This is not an example of a government agency imposing restrictions from on-high to limit private behavior, but of a standards body bringing all interested players together to develop common standards - which are a requirement for the industry in question to function, since a fragmented space of competing proprietary practices would not work. The government basically enables that by lending its weight to the result.
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Not at all.
We were actively involved in the ANSI standards process, and I attended many of the meetings on Carreker's behalf, but that's not the issue, that the Standard wasn't any good. It is a good standard, but it took YEARS to be released AFTER the announcement of Check 21 Regulations, and that long delay, between announcement in 2001 and the release of workable standards is what halted sales of existing paper based products. We scraped by for years waiting for the Standard to get to a level that we could write software that would work with it. Worse though was our competitors, mainly in Europe where already using image based systems (which we couldn't use in the US because of Govt Regulations that did NOT allow an image of a check to be used instead of the item) and so when these initial image based systems came out, we were in Beta testing of new releases and they were adding tweaks to their 3 or 4.0 level products. So again we were screwed. I saw the writing on the wall and left well before the Checkfree acquisition. During this time Carreker went from a growing concern of 600+ down to several hundred or so when it was finally bought by CheckFree.

Arthur
 
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quadraphonics said:
It's more than "input." The standards body is little more than a forum for interested industry players to come together and settle on a consensus.

As someone whose job involves following and participating in the development of various standards, it looks to me like Carreker simply blew it (supposing adoucette's characterizations of the scenario are accurate). My guess is that they were making money off of implementing old standards, and failed to be proactive about keeping up with the industry. Or maybe they did indeed track that standard and participate, but simply failed to get their way, and didn't have a suitable strategy to respond to that.

Anyway, the complaints about standards processes here sound a lot like complaints that the government shouldn't have passed the various laws and enabled the various standards that created automobile transport, because this put the existing horse-and-buggy industry out of business. A big part of progress, especially in a market system, is exactly the occasional destruction and absorption of "existing industry" in favor of newer, better industry.
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As usual Quad, you are absoutely correct.
 
adoucette said:
Deregulation is not the same as the ability to pollute with impunity.

Not all companies want to pollute.
Many people LIVE where their companies are located and are very concerned with their impact on the environment.

There was no expensive equipment that would have prevented the Gulf Oil Spill. It was human error. The people on the rig misread the negative well pressure test and thought the well cement job was holding.

It wasn't.

They didn't notice the indictations that the cement job had failed and that oil was coming up the well for an hour and the acceleration of the flow as the gas expanded in the well bore caused a piece of drilling pipe to jam in the BOP preventing the blind shear ram from doing it's job and shutting off the well bore.

It was a state of the art BOP.

Arthur
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Many of these people believe that God gave us this world to exploit and nothing we can do to it would damage it.
 
adoucette said:
Not at all.
We were actively involved in the ANSI standards process, and I attended many of the meetings on Carreker's behalf, but that's not the issue, that the Standard wasn't any good. It is a good standard, but it took YEARS to be released AFTER the passage of Check 21 Regulations, and that long delay is what halted sales of existing paper based products. We scraped by for years waiting for the Standard to get to a level that we could write software that would work with it. Worse though was our competitors, mainly in Europe where already using image based systems (which we couldn't use in the US because of Govt Regulations that did NOT allow an image of a check to be used instead of the item) and so when these initial image based systems came out, we were in Beta testing of new releases and they were adding tweaks to their 3 or 4.0 level products. So again we were screwed. I saw the writing on the wall and left well before the Checkfree acquisition. During this time Carreker went from a growing concern of 600+ down to several hundred or so when it was finally bought by CheckFree.

So yes, Check 21 regulations were indeed done without regard to the impact on the lives of the thousands of people who had made the entire business of check processing possible and made it so efficient that most banks offered free checking.

Arthur
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So despite all of the laissez faire and anti-regulation rhetoric you want government to play nurse maid to incompetent companies. How much is that going to cost the nation?
 
quadraphonics said:
As someone whose job involves following and participating in the development of various standards, it looks to me like Carreker simply blew it (supposing adoucette's characterizations of the scenario are accurate). My guess is that they were making money off of implementing old standards, and failed to be proactive about keeping up with the industry. Or maybe they did indeed track that standard and participate, but simply failed to get their way, and didn't have a suitable strategy to respond to that.
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No, we didn't BLOW it.

Prior to 9/11 an image of a check was not allowed in lieu of the original and thus there was no standard at all for image exchange in the US as it wasn't legal to do so.

All our software was written around the process of efficiently getting the physical item from the bank of first deposit to the paying bank as quickly as possible and there was a LOT of software involved in that process.

Then 9/11 happened and they shut the air system down for 3 days and almost no inter-city checks got cleared, or probably about 50 million checks (Average value of ~$500 just sat)

So later that year they announced Check 21.

That hurt, because they basically told the banks that most of the software we were trying to sell them was going to be obsolete, thus why buy our stuff since you couldn't install it and get a positive ROI on it before Check 21 came along.

The government was saying it would be a fact in 2002.

But they finally got around to passing the legislation in Oct of 2003

http://www.ffiec.gov/exam/check21/documents/Public Law 108-100 (Check 21).pdf

The legislation made it take effect a year later, in Oct of 2004.

And authorized the Fed to come up with the standard for the interchange.

The Fed used ANSI to do so but the ANSI X9.37 DSTU that came out in 2003 wasn't workable (it didn't for instance support Credits). The actual version X9-100 version that met our actual processing needs, didn't come out until 2008.

http://www.checkimagecentral.org/pdf/UCD X9 100-187-2008 Final.pdf

It was in those years, from the end of 2001 till around 2007 that sales of existing products plummeted and companies had to cut staff like crazy to have enough money to put into the new image based systems, which you still couldn't sell because the X9 standards weren't ready.

It was tough just to stay afloat.

Worse, other companies that were operating in Europe were exchanging images and their systems were far more advanced than ours as we had no installed base to learn from.

Thus it's no surprise that up till that time the biggest MICR check scanners were all American made, but once the smoke cleared, they were mainly made in Europe.

http://www.paninicheckscanners.com/

Arthur
 
spidergoat said:
Many of these people believe that God gave us this world to exploit and nothing we can do to it would damage it.
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Certainly not MANY.

Of course there are some people that moronic in this world, but luckily someone that stupid rarely rises to a senior level in the business world.

Unfortunately, you do occasionally see them succeed in politics though.

Arthur
 
adoucette said:
No, we didn't BLOW it.

Prior to 9/11 an image of a check was not allowed in lieu of the original and thus there was no standard at all for image exchange in the US as it wasn't legal to do so.

All our software was written around the process of efficiently getting the physical item from the bank of first deposit to the paying bank as quickly as possible and there was a LOT of software involved in that process.

Then 9/11 happened and they shut the air system down for 3 days and almost no inter-city checks got cleared, or probably about 50 million checks (Average value of ~$500 just sat)

So later that year they announced Check 21.

That hurt, because they basically told the banks that most of the software we were trying to sell them was going to be obsolete, thus why buy our stuff since you couldn't install it and get a positive ROI on it before Check 21 came along.

The government was saying it would be a fact in 2002.

But they finally got around to passing the legislation in Oct of 2003

http://www.ffiec.gov/exam/check21/documents/Public Law 108-100 (Check 21).pdf

The legislation made it take effect a year later, in Oct of 2004.

And authorized the Fed to come up with the standard for the interchange.

The Fed used ANSI to do so but the ANSI X9.37 DSTU that came out in 2003 wasn't workable (it didn't for instance support Credits). The actual version X9-100 version that met our actual processing needs, didn't come out until 2008.

http://www.checkimagecentral.org/pdf/UCD X9 100-187-2008 Final.pdf

It was in those years, from the end of 2001 till around 2007 that sales of existing products plummeted and companies had to cut staff like crazy to have enough money to put into the new image based systems, which you still couldn't sell because the X9 standards weren't ready.

It was tough just to stay afloat.

Worse, other companies that were operating in Europe were exchanging images and their systems were far more advanced than ours as we had no installed base to learn from.

Thus it's no surprise that up till that time the biggest MICR check scanners were all American made, but once the smoke cleared, they were mainly made in Europe.

http://www.paninicheckscanners.com/

Arthur
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You are making excuses, others were ready for Check 21. It sounds like you want a nanny state to make sure the laggards are not adversely affected by anything government does in conjunction with industry. That is not a legitimate roll for government. The bottom line here is you company did blow it.
 
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joepistole said:
Is it the charts that are fuzzy or your perceptions?
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I don't know Joe ? Some would say I am delusional so it could be perception . Or a frame of reference perhaps . I was a union worker once . Yeah Carpenters union . I still have my book . In fact I am cashing in me annuity soon as I can get forms filled out . When I was an employee I thought like you and my frame of reference was in-line with democratic agendas . Then when I started a business and became responsible for several employees my frame of reference changed too . It was nothing like I thought when I was an employee . Running a business and making sure it stayed afloat . It is actually surprising how much an employee is not aware of behavior divergences in loyalty to a company. I did manage to learn that before striking out on my own and was a productive employee . One reason only . I learned that the more money I could make for the company the more money they could pay me. Funny thing was is not until I adopted this mind set that my wages increased dramatically . Then I went and fucked it up and started a business . Just joking . I liked being an owner . I was fare to Me employees too .
 
Me-Ki-Gal said:
I don't know Joe ? Some would say I am delusional so it could be perception . Or a frame of reference perhaps . I was a union worker once . Yeah Carpenters union . I still have my book . In fact I am cashing in me annuity soon as I can get forms filled out . When I was an employee I thought like you and my frame of reference was in-line with democratic agendas . Then when I started a business and became responsible for several employees my frame of reference changed too . It was nothing like I thought when I was an employee . Running a business and making sure it stayed afloat . It is actually surprising how much an employee is not aware of behavior divergences in loyalty to a company. I did manage to learn that before striking out on my own and was a productive employee . One reason only . I learned that the more money I could make for the company the more money they could pay me. Funny thing was is not until I adopted this mind set that my wages increased dramatically . Then I went and fucked it up and started a business . Just joking . I liked being an owner . I was fare to Me employees too .
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That doesn't answer the question, and your post is not relevant to the question at hand.
 
More on Obama's over regulation and it's effect on the economy:

Instead, the administration has been saddling the private sector with a stifling load of regulations. The burden of Obamacare, most of which does not take effect until 2014, is mostly in the realm of fear and uncertainty. Employers do not know how much each new hire will cost under the new health care regime. Nor can they estimate how the 129 new boards, commissions and agencies will affect the business world.

Meanwhile, the EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. The NLRB is attempting to prevent the Boeing Corporation from opening a new plant in South Carolina. The FCC is seeking to exert control over Internet commerce through the deceptively named "net neutrality" policy. The Department of Labor is strictly enforcing racial and gender quotas. And the Federal Reserve, along with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (created by the Dodd-Frank law) is practically freezing small-business lending.​
And more good news:
The EPA is currently pushing an unprecedented rewrite of air-pollution rules in an attempt to shut down a large portion of the coal-fired power fleet. Though these regulations are among the most expensive in the agency's history, none were demanded by the late Pelosi Congress. They're all the result of purely bureaucratic discretion under the Clean Air Act, last revised in 1990.

...the EPA's regulatory cascade is a clear and present danger to the reliability and stability of the U.S. power system and grid. The spree affects plants that provide 40% of U.S. baseload capacity in the U.S., and almost half of U.S. net generation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which is charged with ensuring the integrity of the power supply, reported this month in a letter to the Senate that 81 gigawatts of generating capacity is "very likely" or "likely" to be subtracted by 2018 amid coal plant retirements and downgrades.

That's about 8% of all U.S. generating capacity. Merely losing 56 gigawatts—a midrange scenario in line with FERC and industry estimates—is the equivalent of wiping out all power generation for Florida and Mississippi.

In practice, this will mean blackouts and rolling brownouts, as well as spiking rates for consumers...​
.
 
madanthonywayne said:
More on Obama's over regulation and it's effect on the economy:

Instead, the administration has been saddling the private sector with a stifling load of regulations. The burden of Obamacare, most of which does not take effect until 2014, is mostly in the realm of fear and uncertainty. Employers do not know how much each new hire will cost under the new health care regime. Nor can they estimate how the 129 new boards, commissions and agencies will affect the business world.​
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Are you afraid that Obamacare is going to make the healthcare industry competitive?

This is typical often repeated partisan BS. It is fairly clear what Obamacare will cost for most employers. And the really small businesses are exempt from those provisions that would be prohibitive. And most midsize and larger companies already offer employees healthcare coverage and are relatively unaffected by Obamacare.

The new boards are there to make the healthcare system more efficient (e.g. automation of healthcare records) and document the most effective treatments. They are not "Death Panels" as the industry, Republicans and Tea Party devotees would have us believe.

The bottom line here is that the US healthcare system is very inefficient when compared to that of other industrial countries. That is why we pay more than twice what other industrial countries pay for healthcare and the quality of healthcare outcomes in the US are declining in relation to other industrial countries.

Obamacare works to contain and restrain the growth of healthcare expenses in this country by utlizing our resources more efficiently and effectively. If Obamacare can our healthcare expenses in line with those of other industrial countries, it will be a huge boom for private industry and the American middle class.

madanthonywayne said:
Meanwhile, the EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. The NLRB is attempting to prevent the Boeing Corporation from opening a new plant in South Carolina. The FCC is seeking to exert control over Internet commerce through the deceptively named "net neutrality" policy. The Department of Labor is strictly enforcing racial and gender quotas. And the Federal Reserve, along with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (created by the Dodd-Frank law) is practically freezing small-business lending.
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​
madanthonywayne said:
And more good news:
The EPA is currently pushing an unprecedented rewrite of air-pollution rules in an attempt to shut down a large portion of the coal-fired power fleet. Though these regulations are among the most expensive in the agency's history, none were demanded by the late Pelosi Congress. They're all the result of purely bureaucratic discretion under the Clean Air Act, last revised in 1990.

...the EPA's regulatory cascade is a clear and present danger to the reliability and stability of the U.S. power system and grid. The spree affects plants that provide 40% of U.S. baseload capacity in the U.S., and almost half of U.S. net generation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which is charged with ensuring the integrity of the power supply, reported this month in a letter to the Senate that 81 gigawatts of generating capacity is "very likely" or "likely" to be subtracted by 2018 amid coal plant retirements and downgrades.

That's about 8% of all U.S. generating capacity. Merely losing 56 gigawatts—a midrange scenario in line with FERC and industry estimates—is the equivalent of wiping out all power generation for Florida and Mississippi.

In practice, this will mean blackouts and rolling brownouts, as well as spiking rates for consumers...​
.
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What do any of these allegations have anything to do with Obama? These laws, with the exception of Dodd-Frank, were on the books prior to Obama taking office. You want to ding the president for doing his job? And Dodd-Frank was put on the books to prevent another 2008 financial crisis and the need to bailout the banking system again. By the way, the NLRB which the agency preventing the opening of a Boeing facility in South Carolina is one of those independent agencies that are not under the control of the president - one of them minor details again.

It is good of you and your partisan friends at Ruppert's rag tell us how much electrical capacity is going to be lost from retiring coal fired plants in the next 7 years. Now why don't you and your friends tell us how much new electrical production is being added over the same period of time or why those facilities are going to be retired? And while you are at it, why is it Obama's fault that older coal fire plants are being retired?

Coal is an idea that has come and gone. Natural gas is a better fuel for generating electricity. It is cleaner and more abundant and cheap. That is why you are seeing a lot of electrical utilities choosing natural gas as opposed to coal. Now that decision has upset people in the coal industry and their Republican friends in congress. But it is called innovation and good old fashioned free market competition. Coal is has become expensive in relation to natural gas. That is why coal for elecrical production in the US is on the way out.

"Coal-to-gas switching. The increase in delivered coal prices and the decrease in delivered natural gas prices, combined with surplus capacity at highly-efficient gas-fired combined-cycle plants resulted in coal-to-gas fuel switching. This occurred particularly in the Southeast (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina) and also Pennsylvania. Nationwide, coal-fired electric power generation declined 11.6 percent from 2008 to 2009, bringing coal's share of the electricity power output to 44.5 percent, the lowest level since 1978. Coal consumption at U.S. power plants paralleled the decline in generation, dropping 10.3 percent from 2008.

http://205.254.135.24/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html

In sharp contrast, natural gas-fired generation increased 4.3 percent in 2009, despite the 4.1-percent decline in overall electric generation. The natural gas share of generation increased to 23.3 percent—the highest level since 1970. Electricity's share of the total U.S. natural gas consumption has also risen rapidly, growing from 17 percent in 1996 to over 30 percent in 2009.[8]" - EIA


http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html

So the bottom line here is that the reason coal fired plants for electricity generation are not growing is because of free market factors, not the EPA as alledged. By the way, the average age of a US coal fired electrical production plant is 44 years acording to EIA data.
 
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madanthonywayne said:
More disturbing news:

Talk about not learning from past mistakes: A government department is again intimidating banks into lending to minority borrowers at below-market rates, all in the name of combating "discrimination." Welcome to the next housing mess.
​

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It's not at all disturbing Mad. This is just you citing an opinion piece in another of Ruppert's right wing papers. Not suprisingly it has no references and totally misrepresents the cause of the Great Recession and regulation in Washington.

The cause of the Great Recession was not the poor loans. It was the misreprentation of those loans and the remarketing and unregulated trading of derivatives related to those loans.

If you have to lie and misrepresent information to get support, as Republicans /Tea Partier supporters do, then there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
 
"But what Justice is up to sounds like the same government-directed, quota-based lending push that brought us the last housing boom and bust."
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But it isn't, nor is that what caused the housing collapse.


"These settlements include requirements that banks lend to minorities at below-market rates and, in effect, dish out cash to politically favored "community groups." It's a good bet that many of these loans will eventually go bad."
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Why? Because they are minorities?

Here is a non-bullshit article about the same subject that reveals exactly what this is about:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/08/AR2010040806443.html

It turns out that lenders were using brokers who took advantage of minorities by charging them higher fees. The lenders didn't think they would be responsible for this discrimination, but the justice department thinks they are.
Mortgages extended to African Americans often carried higher fees than those to white subprime applicants -- even when the borrowers' credit profiles and other factors were about the same.

Community groups and civil rights advocates hailed the settlement as a huge step forward. "It's a new day for borrowers," said David Berenbaum, chief program officer for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. "Borrowers should see fewer backdoor pricing abuses" -- especially the bloated fees, interest rates and unequal underwriting standards that were commonplace during the housing boom years.​

And this article:

There are several places where we can look to find the real culprits in the current economic crisis. They include the decades of housing and lending discrimination that led to the exponential growth in abusive subprime loans; the lack of adequate regulations in the mortgage lending sector; the deregulation in the financial sector including the mortgage lending sector; the failure to enforce existing consumer protection laws; the 2000 law that ensured that credit default swaps would remain unregulated; the 2004 SEC decision to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow more than 30 times their capital; the unchecked close relations between rating agencies and companies packaging mortgages and selling securities; and the failure of the SEC to oversee the brokerage firms as they got further invested into subprime debt. These are the culprits of the economic crisis.

There is enough evidence that the current crisis is the result of misbehavior by brokers, lenders, servicers, and the mortgage-backed securities industry that even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in a 2007 Newsweek interview that the “big demand” for subprime mortgages “was not so much on the part of the borrowers as it was on the part of the suppliers who were giving loans which really most people couldn’t afford.” Handsome profits were made at each level of the supply chain, not least of all by investors on Wall Street, who became the prime drivers for expanding high-cost unconventional home mortgage loans.​
 
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