BUSH STAHP

That's easy to believe if you have no idea how we got into this mess. Let's review. The recession came from problems in the housing loans market. The problem was that banks were giving loans to people who really couldn't afford them. Democrats started calling this "predatory lending" in order to make the banks look like the villains. Truth is this hurt the banks. These loans began when the government and other groups started pressuring banks to make loans to make loans to people that were considered high risk.

Obama actually defended this practice after the collapse, and while he was running for president, saying it was a good idea at the time, and the thought was that if they spread the risk broadly enough, it wouldn't be a problem. Obama actually fought for these types of loans as a community organizer and lawyer, but Obama wasn't a big player.

These loans really took off under Clinton in 1994 when he made some big changes to the Community Reinvestment Act in order to increase loans to poor neighborhoods. These loans worked fine when the price of housing was increasing, because you cold get into a house, have a balloon payment that you'd never be able to afford, then sell the house for profit before the balloon payment was due. So many people being able to take advantage of this pushed up the price of houses, and made doing this exact thing even easier. However when the price of houses goes down, then this no longer works. Then we have a bunch of people who can't pay their mortgages, and loads of houses get dropped on the market which pushes house prices down further. Then the banks have all their money tied into housing, and they can't make loans to companies that need to make payroll, so some weaker companies fail. Car sales go down because it's harder to get loans and there's a ripple effect.