Barney Frank didn’t cause the housing crisis

The Washington Post reiterates Barney Frank didn’t cause the housing crisis "So was Barney Frank to blame for our woes? There are two lines of argument here, and neither is all that compelling. The first contention is that Frank failed to exercise diligent oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as the housing bubble swelled. There’s something to this, though it’s worth noting that Frank was in the congressional minority for most of the period in question. The second argument is that Frank and other Democrats — by promoting policies to boost affordable housing — somehow caused the subprime mess and financial collapse. That argument is especially hard to square with the facts."



"Still, Fannie and Freddie were starting to act recklessly in other ways. As Jeff Madrick and Frank Portnoy detail in the New York Review of Books, Fannie Mae “aggressively minimized federal regulation of its activities and it fought off attempts to tax its profits, partly through extravagant favors to influential lawmakers.” Frank was one of those favored lawmakers — between 1989 and 2008 he received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie. Frank even helped get his then-boyfriend a job at Fannie Mae. And yet, for the bulk of this period, Democrats in Congress were in the minority. Even if Frank wanted to help out Fannie and Freddie, he wasn’t in a position to lead these efforts until 2007. (In 2005, when Frank helped sponsor a bipartisan House bill to create an independent regulator for Fannie and Freddie, it died in the Senate.)"