Barney Frank phobia is running rampant among the commenters on the Worcester T & G comment boards.  For the latest example, see the comments about Editorial cartoon by David Hitch.

The premise of these people is that the recent economic crash was primarily created by Senator Dodd and Representative Frank.

In answer to this propaganda, I always present the case that the crash was primarily caused by the banks who were happy to give mortgages to people who had no hope of paying them off.  The banks only held the mortgages long enough to sell them to unwary investors.  The banks were assuring the investors and the ratings agencies that these were high quality mortgages that met all standards even though the loans were called “Liar Loans” in the trade.  They got this name because the mortgage brokers encouraged the mortgage applicants to lie about their ability to pay the monthly payments.  The banks were touting the fact that nothing on the application form would be verified by the bank.  The banks just wanted mortgage paper that they could sell at a huge profit to investors.

I finally goaded one of the Barneyphobes to post a video of proof that it was Frank’s fault.

It seemed pretty likely that this video played the same trick that they played on Shirley Sherrod to make it look like she was saying the opposite of what she had really said.

I couldn’t find the C-SPAN video of Frank’s full speech in 2005 that was cherry picked in the above video. I did find a C-SPAN video of an interview with Barney Frank recorded on Sunday, November 26, 2006. At that time he was incoming chairman House Financial Services Committee. To me it seemed pretty clear that the edited video was unlikely to have represented his ideas in a fair manner.

More over, I had previously given a link to an article in The Wall Street Journal about a Harvard BA Thesis that corroborates my take on the recent crash. Any opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal is likely to be as extreme right wing as one could possibly get. If even they think that the bankers and insurance companies (like AIG) were primarily responsible for the crash, I would have thought even a Worcester T & G reader might accept the idea.  (Well, I would have thought that for only a nanosecond.)

Any way, I only report. You, dear reader, can decide for yourself.

You might want to read my post about the book 13 Bankers. In that post I have a number of quotes from the book that explains who did what to whom to bring about the financial crisis. In the book, Fannie Mae and Freddie Max are not blameless, but they are not the prime movers.