Thursday Open Thread

Welcome to your almost-daily open thread. Do you have any burning issues that you just can’t wait to talk about? Share them here.

The man charged with threatening Nancy Pelosi lives off government largesse (of course he does):

The San Francisco man arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her support for health care reform spent five years harassing a local church – until its custodian helped break the case involving Pelosi, the church’s lawyer said.

Gregory Lee Giusti, 48, was arrested at noon at his Tenderloin apartment. A tall, hulking man who kept to himself, Giusti was not well known – or well liked – at the federally subsidized Marlton Manor where he has lived for more than a decade, said neighbor Rose Riggs.

“When he’d start with me about political stuff,” she said, “I’d just back off.”

Giusti also has a history of welfare fraud, threats and riding public transportation without paying. Obviously this man has some issues with his mental stability.

Alan Greenspan doesn’t think he is to blame in the current financial crisis. In testimony in front of Congress yesterday Greenspan allowed that he might have been a little bit wrong:

My experience has been, in the business I was in, I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time. And there are an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years.”

Mother Jones discusses Greenspan’s actual record:

What Greenspan left out is those guidance papers, as their name implies, didn’t require the recpipients to take any action whatsoever. He also neglected to mention that in spite of boatloads of research showing the proliferation of abusive lending practices, the Fed, as the Washington Post reported, not only blew off those worrying signs but refused to supervise lenders and their compliance with federal consumer protection laws. In 1998 it even adopted a policy “to not conduct consumer compliance examinations of, nor to investigate consumer complaints regarding, nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies.” And when non-bank lenders were snapped up by big banks, which the Fed did actively supervise, it declined to scrutinize those non-banking subsidiaries.

Greenspan’s own intransigence played a direct role in the Fed’s hands-off philosophy. As the Post reported, the former chairman argued that inspecting subprime lenders and non-bank institutions would require too much effort and, curiously enough, would give borrowers a false sense of security. It was a contentious move by Greenspan, but his view won out in the end.

Greenspan’s view that no one saw the crisis coming is just plain wrong. There were plenty of people who were ringing warning bells but Greenspan was completely deaf to them.

That consensus, however, did exist among state regulators and fair lending groups. They singled out [pdf] products like no-income-no-job-no-assets, or NINJA, mortgage loans; “liar” loans, in which borrowers didn’t have to prove their income; and negative amortizing loans, when a borrower’s balance actually increased as they made payments. All those loan products, consumer advocates say, are fundamentally toxic and were at the root of the meltdown. Surely the 100 or so Fed staffers tasked with consumer protection during Greenspan’s era could’ve spotted those blatant abuses.

Instead Greenspan blamed Congress and the national push for increased homeownership for hand-cuffing the Fed and preventing it from cracking down on predatory lending. “Congress would have clamped down on” the Fed had it gone after subprime lenders, he claimed.

Greenspan was probably right that Congress would have been upset with him, though I would argue that Greenspan is supposed to keep the best interests of the country in mind instead of Congress.