Barney’s real legacy – and it’s not the housing crash
Barney Frank is retiring and as some see it, he is one of the big culprits behind the housing market crash.
Yes, Barney was as clueless as Greenspan during the bubble years, as were many other national leaders. But Wall Street depravity and the gutting of decades of financial industry regulations were arguably far more meaningful factors behind the collapse.
Love him or hate him, Barney is both brilliant and ready to tell it how it is. My favorite was his smack down of the Tea Party type who, at a forum on Obama's health care plan, asked Frank, "Why are you supporting this Nazi policy."
Said Frank: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table."
When push came to shove in the fall of 2008, Frank put himself squarely on the right side of history, helping push through $789 billion-plus bailout that saved both the banks and the auto industry from collapsing.
If you think the housing market in trouble, then what it would be like now without an auto industry and with most of our major banks in cinders?
Here is an excerpt from one of my recent Banker & Tradesman columns on the subject.
As the Bay State's last great liberal lion heads for the exits, I say this: Thank God for Barney Frank.
In the end, Frank's most enduring legacy may not necessarily be the controversial financial reform bill that bears his name. Arguably, it is instead the way he hung tough with the global economy on the line back in the grim fall of 2008.
And you don't have to be a Democrat, or even remotely liberal, to appreciate that - you just need a little common sense.
Frank, who spent years needling Wall Street as chairman of the powerful House Committee on Financial Services, held his nose during those hair-raising months and helped push through an epic, $700 billion financial services - and later auto industry - bailout.
Combined with some frantic CPR on the world financial system by the Federal Reserve, it was just enough to prevent the world from sliding into a second Great Depression.
Frank is much too savvy a politician not to have known the political grief he would face down the line for his role in passing the bailouts, but unlike most of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, he has never flinched in defending it.
"It was a bipartisan response," an unrepentant Frank recalled over the summer at a Senate hearing aimed at stoking outrage over the massive bailout bill. "We have a thriving American auto industry, which would not have happened if we had not intervened."
