Hillary Clinton’s New Anti-Trump Ad Misses the Mark
A new attack ad put out by the Hillary Clinton campaign this week achieves the near-impossible, making Donald Trump look wronged and (almost) like a victim. More believably, it makes the Democrats look sleazy and disingenuous in comparison.
The ad begins with a picture of a grinning Trump and the words, “In 2006, Donald Trump was hoping for a real estate crash.”
It proceeds to a series of grim scenes from the financial crisis. Against a Roger and Me-esque montage of blighted neighborhoods, it reads off stats: “9 million Americans lost their jobs. 5 million people lost their homes.”
Then it returns to a grinning Trump, and another line:
“And the man who could be our next president…
was rooting for it to happen.”
Then we hear Trump talking about how a bursting of the real-estate bubble would be an opportunity for rich folks like himself.
“I sort of hope that happens, because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump says, in an interview from 2006. “If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know, you could make a lot of money.”
Cut to: “If Donald wins, you lose.”
This ad is disingenuous in a dozen different ways. For one thing, the destruction that the Clinton campaign describes was not caused by people swooping in after the bubble burst, buying at the bottom of the market.
It was caused by the existence of a speculative bubble in the first place. And that bubble was inflated not by Donald Trump, but by the people who have at least in part bankrolled Hillary Clinton’s career: namely, Wall Street banks.
In the mid-2000s, a speculative mania swallowed up the real-estate markets largely because Wall Street discovered a new (and often criminally fraudulent) way to peddle mortgage securities.
The basic trick involved big banks buying up the risky home loans of subprime borrowers — the loans of people who often lacked verified incomes and had poor credit histories — and repackaging them as highly rated mortgage securities.
Basically they took risky loans and presented them as somewhat safer investments to a range of investors, all of whom later got clobbered: pension funds, hedge funds, unions, even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This technique, of turning rancid home loans into a kind of financial hamburger and then selling it off as grade-A beef to institutional investors, created artificial demand in the real-estate markets, which in turn led to the speculative mania.
The bubble stayed inflated for a few years because a continual influx of new investors kept the old investors from losing their shirts for a while. The layman’s term for this is a Ponzi scheme.
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