“The history of this immediate fiasco goes back to FDR in 1938, when Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) was created to finance home loans. In 1970, Richard Nixon created Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Company) to buy mortgages from local lenders, which were packaged into bundles and sold to big investors with an implicit federal guarantee. These ‘companies’ are actually ‘government-sponsored enterprises’ or GSE. … [Bill] Clinton ordered these two GSE to expand loans to low-income borrowers, and created the ’sub-prime’ market. Government guaranteed loans were give to millions who couldn’t qualify for mortgages in the real world of the free market: this is socialism, pure and simple. Companies that didn’t play ball and make the loans to bundle and sell to the GSEs were actually sued to force them to do so, claiming that they were being racially bigoted.” (10/06/08)