Video: Frank in 2005 — Bubble? What bubble?

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Barney Frank argued this week that he had always warned about the excesses of pushing home ownership and had advocated for rentals instead. Our friends at Verum Serum couldn’t believe their ears, because Frank has long been one of the loudest voices supporting the CRA and Fannie/Freddie policies that encouraged irresponsible lending. Here’s Frank making that clear on the floor of Congress on June 27, 2005, in support of the recognition of National Home Ownership Month:

I think we have an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy. Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity — home ownership, homes — where there is not the degree of leverage we have seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation; we have problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality. People building fiber-optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you’re not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so, those of us on our committee in particular, will continue to push for home ownership.