Drew Zahn is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.WorldNetDaily as decribed by David Duke as “one of the few news organizations in the country that tells the truth.”

People can now decide believe the WSJ, or Mr, Hassett and Zahn.

Two exerts from WSJ:
1.
Ambitious lenders such as Seattle-based Washington Mutual’s Long Beach Mortgage, which between 2004 and 2006 made $48 billion in high-rate loans, used armies of outside brokers to push subprime loans into the suburbs. (A company slogan: “The Power of Yes.”) The result was a mortgage bonanza that reached every racial and ethnic group, income level and geographic area.

2.
Kristine McMahon has a six-figure income as a mortgage broker and lives in a four-bedroom home in East Hampton, N.Y., valued at more than $2.7 million. Yet Ms. McMahon, who works for Manhattan Mortgage, chose a subprime loan for herself when she refinanced last year to turn some of her home equity into cash. Ms. McMahon says that at the time of the refinancing, a conventional lender would not allow her to take out as much cash during the refinancing as her subprime lender, New Century Financial Corp., which is now operating under bankruptcy-court protection. Ms. McMahon chose a subprime loan that carried a fixed-rate of 6.45% for the first two years before turning into an adjustable rate. She plans to sell the house before the higher adjustable rates kick in.

Guess again who’s to blame for U.S. mortgage meltdown
Analysts point not to greed, but to social activist politics
Posted: September 19, 2008
By Drew Zahn

While many pundits are pointing to corporate greed and a lack of government regulation as the cause for the American mortgage and financial crisis, some analysts are saying it wasn’t too little government intervention that cased the mortgage meltdown, but too much, in the form of activists compelling the government to pressure Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into unsound – though politically correct – lending practices.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0
How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis
By Kevin Hassett

“Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that’s worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.”

“The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s mortgage policies fueled the trend towards issuing risky loans. In 1995, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began receiving affordable housing credit for purchasing mortgage bank securities which included loans to low income borrowers. This resulted in the agencies purchasing subprime securities. Subprime mortgage loan originations surged by a whopping 25 percent per year between 1994 and 2003, resulting in a nearly ten-fold increase in the volume of these loans in just nine years. As of November 2007 Fannie Mae a held a total of $55.9 billion of subprime securities and $324.7 billion of Alt-A securities in their portfolios.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#Government_policies and notes thereto.