{"id":3330,"date":"2008-09-30T10:27:26","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T14:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=3330"},"modified":"2008-09-30T10:27:26","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T14:27:26","slug":"credit-surplus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=3330","title":{"rendered":"Credit Surplus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are a lot of \"what happened to the economy\" articles out there right now. But this is the first one I've seen that ties the situation back to Bush's tax cuts; <a href=\"http:\/\/rushkoff.com\/index.php?s=credit+crunch&x=0&y=0\">Douglas Rushkoff<\/a> take it away:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Bush\u2019s tax cuts and other measures favoring the rich led to the biggest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in American history. The result was that the wealthy\u2014the investment class\u2014had more money to invest, or lend, than there were people and businesses looking to borrow.<\/p>\n<p>The easiest way to bring more borrowers into the system\u2014and to create more of a market for money\u2014was to promote homeownership in America. This is precisely what the Bush administration did, touting home ownership as an American right. Of course, they weren\u2019t talking about home ownership at all, but rather pushing people to borrow money tied to the value of a house. If people could be persuaded to take mortgages on homes, real estate values would go up for those already invested (like land trusts and real estate funds) and banks would have a market for the excess money they had accumulated.<\/p>\n<p>In short, there was a surplus of credit in the system. Americans were encouraged to borrow in the form of mortgages, which created demand for the credit banks wanted to sell. In many cases the credit itself wasn\u2019t even real, but leveraged off some other inflated commodity that the bank or investor may have owned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are a lot of \"what happened to the economy\" articles out there right now. But this is the first one I've seen that ties the situation back to Bush's tax cuts; Douglas Rushkoff take it away: Bush\u2019s tax cuts and other measures favoring the rich led to the biggest redistribution of wealth from poor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}