These are scary economic times. Some of our largest banks have either gone under, or are flirting with disaster. Every day the Dow Jones seems to scrape a little deeper into the bottom of the barrel. I think Bill Kramer just had an aneurism on cable television. All this uncertainty is enough to make me consider pulling my money out of the bank and stock market, and into something safer, like Beanie Babies, or Tom Noe’s coin collection.

Naturally, politicians and pundits have been falling all over themselves to blame “other people” for this mess, with varying degrees of accuracy. One of the more ridiculous explanations for our current financial disarray is to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Bill Clinton, and poor, minority home owners. This idea has been making the rounds on the typical news outlets, and was suggested in The Lantern by Jack Millman. Just like the books on Wall Street, this idea just doesn’t add up.

First, if you want to blame government programs that promoted minority home-ownership for this mess, the buck shouldn’t stop with Bill Clinton. The Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration didn’t come up with the idea of helping low-income and minority individuals buy homes on their own. It started with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, under the Carter Administration. The CRA was born to combat the practice of red-lining, or prohibiting minorities to live in certain areas by denying them loans. The CRA was amended during Clinton administration, as well as in both Bush administrations. Promoting low-income home-ownership was not solely the brainchild of Clinton.

Secondly, these types of loans represented only a fraction of the real estate and financial services industries. The CRA’s influence was limited to only certain kinds of banks, and a recent study by the mortgage law expert Traiger and Hinckley law firm shows that CRA banks were actually less likely to make the risky home purchase loans that fueled the crisis. There were also other kinds of risky loans being handed out. It wasn’t just the man living on Detroit and Summit that had his house foreclosed, but the guy building his third mansion in Las Vegas or Miami.

Placing the blame solely on minorities and Clinton ignores the massive impact of real estate speculators, and those buying homes for the purpose of “flipping.” What makes a bigger impact on a bank: defaulting on a $150,000 house, or a $750,000 house?

Personally, I think trying to arbitrarily assign partisan blame on any singular source isn’t helpful (or accurate). This crisis is too complicated to lay on a single person, bill or administration. We could credibly look at the Gramm-Leach-Baily act, which deregulated the financial sector, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or regulators who were asleep at the switch, greedy bankers, your roommate, any of the last several presidents and the Fed. All of them played a role in this crisis, and all of them should take some of the heat. Trying to score political points by ignoring all the other factors is just intellectually dishonest.

You might even say it’s bankrupt.

Matt Brown is a senior in political science. He can be reached at [email protected].