Letters | 11 October 2008

The blame game

Sir: While I do not flinch from looking on the Clinton era as a disaster for its neglect of the threat to global security posed by bin Laden et al and the tacit encouragement of Enron-style corporate accounting, I think blaming the Democrats for the credit crunch may be going a little too far (‘Clinton is to blame’, 4 October).

The politically correct housing agenda described in Dennis Sewell’s article was not conducted in secret, or if it was it would be difficult to imagine that the post-Watergate right-wing media in the US would have allowed it to be secret for long. It should have been possible for the highly paid analysts employed by all the financial institutions affected to have seen the quality of the securitised housing loans and valued them accordingly or had their employers steer clear of them completely.

Considering that the FBI is now investigating activities at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac among others, this indicates that pertinent information on the true value of the securitised loans may not have been made clear at the time of their securitisation.