Cuomo's HUD Covered Up In Lib 'Documentary'

10 Reasons You Should Not Waste Your Money On Film 'Inside Job'

'Inside Job" bills itself as "the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis." It exposes whoremongering Wall Street traders, economic consultants who lie on their resumes and Hank Paulson's conflicts.

But it doesn't answer what caused the crisis...

• No. 1: Ferguson, a 55-year-old millionaire who also created the anti-Iraq war documentary, "No End In Sight," has a political agenda. FEC campaign records show he gives exclusively to Democrats — and gives a lot.

Ferguson, who advised the Clinton White House, has personally donated more than $200,000 to Democrats, including Barack Obama. He's a major Democrat activist, bordering on party functionary, which explains all the "gotcha" interviews with Bush officials, whose words are edited to bumbling and otherwise unflattering sound bites.

You won't find his political bias mentioned in any of the rave reviews for his film. The New York Times, Time magazine and even the Wall Street Journal portray him as an earnest documentarian. In fact, Ferguson is just a slicker (and skinnier) version of filmmaker Michael Moore...

• No. 3: "Inside Job" is completely silent about the affordable-housing mandates HUD foisted on Fannie and Freddie. As the accompanying chart shows, the goals forced the government-sponsored mortgage giants to devote fully half their business to risky loans for poor and minority borrowers.

By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had underwritten 12 million in subprime and other risky mortgages — roughly half the toxic debt outstanding and much more than the combined holdings of the Wall Street banks "Inside Job" demonizes.

HUD's draconian social goals are the most elemental cause of the subprime crisis. Yet Ferguson, who boasts of conducting "extensive research," somehow couldn't find any room for them in his two-hour movie.

• No. 4: "Inside Job" also ignores the role played by the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining regulation that requires banks to make mortgages to borrowers in predominantly poor and minority Census tracts.

In 1995, President Clinton revised the regulation to pressure banks to bend lending standards. The changes contributed to the large number of subprime and other risky loans that failed in the banking crisis. Bankers didn't make dodgy loans to poor and uncreditworthy people out of the goodness of their hearts. Politicians pushed them to make them.

Clinton also for the first time authorized Fannie and Freddie to earn HUD credits by purchasing securities backed by subprime mortgages, which HUD promoted as "goals-rich loans." When Fannie and Freddie securitized subprime loans, they suddenly became safe, since the ratings agencies viewed their securitizations as guaranteed by Treasury.

When Wall Street jumped into that market, it simply responded to the distorted incentives Washington had created — a side of the equation conspicuously absent from "Inside Job."

• No. 5: The film claims minority borrowers were "put into" subprime loans by "predatory lenders" such as Countrywide Financial. Yet it was HUD that put Countrywide into the subprime business.

After the Clinton HUD threatened to investigate Countrywide for lending discrimination, the mortgage lender signed a government contract agreeing to relax its lending standards and increase the number of minority loans. Countrywide soon became the biggest subprime lender. If Ferguson had done his research, he would have found that HUD was the biggest predatory lender of all...

• No. 8: A mysterious source used throughout the movie is one Andrew Sheng, described simply as "chief adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission." He happens to be a communist party functionary based in Beijing. The banking commission he serves is a department of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, which maintains an interlocking membership with the top levels of the communist party of China.

This explains why Ferguson took his crew to China and gained access to sweat shops, where workers conveniently blamed the global economic crisis on American capitalism. Sheng, for his part, lectures Americans about "private gains at public loss." Xinhua News Agency, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, couldn't have written a better script.

• No. 9: But the main source threaded throughout this so-called documentary is a radical anti-redlining community organizing group out of Berkeley, Calif., where Ferguson also happens to be based. The co-founder of the Greenlining Institute, described only as an "advocacy group," returns at the close of each of the film's multiple parts and provides the exclamation point.

If you didn't know better, you'd think Greenlining wrote the outline for the film. Greenlining's Bob Gnaizda is portrayed as an early whistle-blower on the crisis, when in fact his group was pushing banks to ease lending requirements for minorities with shaky credit in the run-up to it.

Gnaizda started Greenlining to open up lending in urban areas it accused banks of redlining — thus the name "Greenlining." When a documentary filmmaker hides the true agenda of its main source, alarm bells should go off all over the media...