Now Who Will the Feral Idiots Blame?

WASHINGTON | A campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable for lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and in e-mail.

Commentators say that was what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They specifically target Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants that the federal government seized Sept. 6. They say that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.

Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers in the housing boom from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.

Federal Reserve Board data show that:

•More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

•Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

•Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that the critics lambaste.

The “turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007,” the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets reported Friday.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.