Ten months back, at the very end of September, I posted online a brief piece entitled Obama’s Wrecking Crew, in which I drew attention to a column in The New York Post in which Charles Gasparino reported two items of interest. First, that the titans of Wall Street – men such as Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (once at Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein – were beginning, in private, to express grave misgivings concerning the Obama administration’s stewardship of the economy. And, second, that these insiders were also telling him that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers were complaining to them that they had almost no say in policy decisions. “Obama,” these two were said to have lamented, “is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.”

In that post, I predicted that Geithner, a young man whose time had come, would suffer, at least for a while, in silence, and I suggested that self-respect would cause Summers to bolt. “Within the world of economics,” I wrote, “his is a name to be conjured with; and, unlike Paul Krugman, he has not in public prostituted himself for partisan advantage. It must be excruciating to watch while Obama’s wrecking crew destroys the foundations for American prosperity.”

As I predicted, Geithner is still there and is still willing to parrot the administration line regarding matters such as marginal tax rates. But Summers has not yet bolted – perhaps because he has nowhere to go. He rose to become Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, and he failed ignominiously as President of Harvard. Where, he has no doubt asked himself, do I go from here?

However this may be, my general point was correct – as has become evident in the last few weeks. Not to put a fine point on it, the rats have begun leaving Obama’s ship. The first to announce his departure was our current President’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag, who had been a budget hawk when – as head of the Congressional Budget Office in 2007 and 2008 – he scored the various budget proposals submitted by President George W. Bush. Last Thursday, Christina Romer , Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, announced that she would soon follow Orszag’s example.

Neither Orszag nor Romer is a fool. They were party to a con, and they surely knew it.

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Charles Gasparino does a very nice job exposing Freddie Mac,  Fannie Mae, and their advocates for the destructive forces that they are. Everyone, even Obama for a while, recognizes that at the heart of the financial markets meltdown was the collapse in the US housing market, which itself was a bubble enabled in various ways by government programs explicitly designed to increase the percentage of people owning homes.

Whether through the Community Reinvestment Act or through a relentless Federal Reserve bank policy of next-to-zero percent interest rates or guarantees of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (and major incentives to them to buy any mortgage on secondary markets no matter how dubiously documented or financed), it’s clear that pro-home-ownership policies massively increased housing prices and risky loans.

Yet what blows my mind, is that currently the government is again pumping billions of dollars into various programs to increase home ownership rates and to stabilize or increase home values throughout the country.

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