I'm not sure how that bears on on Ritholtz' blog. Ritholz is just saying if you are going to blame the drop in the market on Obama's first 40 days in office why wasn't Bush blamed for a similar drop during his first 40 days in office. I think his point is you really can't blame either on this early in their respective administrations.

Re the role of the CRA in the crisis.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201641
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/12/04/dont-blame-cra-the-sequel/
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
http://seekingalpha.com/article/96798-don-t-blame-fannie-and-freddie

I think the Slate piece says it best...

"Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?

Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital."




>I think that guy should have pointed to this:
>
>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260
>
>
>>Another take on Obama and the DOW
>>
>>http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/03/2000-crash-bush-09-obama/
>>
>>>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html
>>>
>>>Snippet:
>>>
>>>It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
>>>
>>>Martin KozlowskiThe illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
>>>
>>>Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history.
>>>
>>>and:
>>>
>>>On the growth effects of a large expansion of government, the European social welfare states present a window on our potential future: standards of living permanently 30% lower than ours. Rounding off perceived rough edges of our economic system may well be called for, but a major, perhaps irreversible, step toward a European-style social welfare state with its concomitant long-run economic stagnation is not.
>>>
>>>Where is the supporting evidence for the standards of living statement? Everything I've read shows EU standards of living above ours.
>>>
>>>And Charles Krauthammer gives his 2 cents worth:
>>>
>>>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html