Bloomberg: Occupy protesters should blame Congress, not banks, for mortgage crisis

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he understood the complaints of Occupy Wall Street protesters but said they should direct their blame for many of the country's economic woes at Congress and not the nation's big banks.

"I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said Tuesday at a business breakfast in New York according to Capital New York. "Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't gave gotten them without that."

Bloomberg said it was Congress that encouraged Americans to rashly take out loans.

"But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will," Bloomberg continued. "They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."

Since the anti-Wall Street protests were launched, Bloomberg has at times experienced friction with the protesters but has also said it was important to protect their First Amendment right to protest.

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