#mark davidson

Interview: Mark Davidson of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers @bobdylancenter @americanahighways #markdavidson @glenncookphotography #americanamusic #americanahighways #bodylancenter #thebobdylancenter #musicinterviews @woodyguthriecenter

WWL Weekly Review for 06/01/19 (Davidson vs Dynamite)

The rhetoric surrounding the Great Recession and the financial crisis was thick.  Once the questions concerning how far the crisis would proceed and what was going to happen next were settled, the focus fell on the basic question of why this had happened.  It is difficult to say what explanation prevailed, but there appeared to be a 'moderate' consensus that there was plenty of blame to go around and that the crisis was the result of greedy bankers and greedy borrowers... Columnist and pundit Leslie Marshall summed up the increasingly common view of the crisis in a U.S. News and World Report column in 2009.  The essay is a masterpiece in apparently evenhanded criticism.  She starts with a rejection of the ridiculous Right (radio commentators such as Rush Limbaugh) and moves to a discussion of the culpability of the first Bush administration.  She ends, however, with the following, "Lastly why can't we ever look in the mirror and blame ourselves?  Or in this case the borrowers' and the lenders' greed?  In short, our greed." While 'moderates' blamed both sides, conservatives worked to deflect the blame from the financial industry and proffered some unusual conclusions.  Michelle Malkin popularized the term 'predatory borrower' and Thomas Sowell Aggressively blamed government regulation, particularly the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for forcing financial institutions to make bad loans.  Sowell's argument, made in dozens of columns and speeches, was adopted widely by conservatives, and continues to be repeated even now as a way of impugning Dood-Frank.  This is despite quite a lot of careful, econometrics-based research- some of it done by Federal Reserve economists- indicated that CRA loans were not a contributing factor in the financial crisis. The tenor of these arguments is much the same as the rhetoric behind austerity.  Poor people, particularly poor people of color, have caused our economic problems, and as a result of this they must be disciplined in some manner.  Mark Blyth (2013) provides a wide-ranging discussion and critique of the appeal of austerity.  It appears to have its own logic.  Belt tightening seems to make sense in times of economic contractions (even though it is not effective economic policy), and this falls neatly into the general conservative agenda of minimizing government spending, especially on social programs aimed at low-income individuals.  While Blyth does not address the housing market, the basic logic that he outlines works well in the housing context.  The goal of an austere mortgage-lending reform ought to be to both regulate the financial institutions and also to discipline prospective borrowers.  This logic makes sense if one accepts the contention that entities on both sides of the lending equation bear blame for triggering the crisis.  However, it ignores the role of a financial industry that was making record profits on subprime lending, and that had begun to aggressively move the lending tactics honed in the inner city to middle-income suburban areas because of their profitability.  It ignores the role of the securitization industry that required ever more loans to securitize, and of the Byzantine derivatives industry issuing credit default swaps that no one was able to evaluate.  Thus, when the crisis had passed and policymakers attempted to sift through the rubble, the resulting regulations were as concerned with protecting the economy from poor people as they were with protecting the financial industry from itself.