Whenever members of Congress retire, there tends to be an atmosphere of goodwill towards them as if the damage they’ve done to the economy and the country has come to an end. That may actually be the case when it comes to the vast majority of the politicians who leave office, but the actions of some politicians will have a lasting effect on the nation. Now that Barney Frank, a 16 term Congressman from Massachusetts, has announced his retirement, news outlets are quickly forgetting the damage the man did to the US economy in the past decade.

What Barney Frank should be remembered for is not the easy to digest, gossip-like trash the media will feed you; it’s the fact that he was the chief architect of the subprime mortgage crisis / the housing bubble that left hundreds of thousands of Americans homeless and millions more in destitution. The repercussions of Frank’s actions, chiefly pushing the Community Reinvestment Act, and his strong-arming of Fannie Mae to lend to people who obviously couldn’t repay large loans, will outlast his his terms in office.

During his early to mid 2000s push of the idea that everyone should own a home including his less fortunate constituents, who couldn’t obtain loans based on their semblant inability to repay them, Frank convinced then Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, to artificially lower interest rates. This would in turn encourage banks to make more loans, which it ofcourse did. That wasn’t enough, however, so Barney Frank coerced Fannie Mae into making risky subprime loans (loans to borrowers with poor credit or borrowers who will likely default).

Frank’s actions pumped the housing bubble and inflated the prices of homes far beyond market value. The number of home owners, especially in poorer congressional districts, grew and voters repaid Democrats for helping them secure loans by reelecting them.

As expected, subprime borrowers defaulted starting in 2007. Then came the market crash and again came Barney Frank and his ragtag crew of central economic planners to the rescue. This time they blamed Wall Street for gambling with subprime mortgages, which is true, but were it not for Congress those unstable mortgages would not have existed in the first place. Senator Chris Dodd, another bad actor in the collapse of the housing bubble, allied once more with Barney Frank and together they passed the Dodd-Frank Reform bill in 2010 in order to further regulate the “free market” which they charged for causing the crisis.

Barney Frank’s lack of understanding of basic economics was questioned by many throughout the decade and was becoming more and more pronounced the more he spoke. During a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee on September 10th, 2003, Frank dismissed the idea of a housing bubble,

 I worry, frankly, that there’s a tension here. The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios. . . .

In 2005, on the House floor, Barney Frank essentially asked, “What housing bubble?” after free market economists had warned Congress countless times about a looming housing crisis.  Whether Barney Frank willfully misguided Americans or whether he is as incompetent as he appears at face value remains to be known, but what is painfully apparent and what should never be forgotten is the devastation this man caused to the US economy.