Bloomberg said protesters turned to the easiest target. Bloomberg to 'Occupy': Blame Congress

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday said Occupy Wall Street is picking on the wrong guy.

Bloomberg said the protesters should not be directing their anger at banks, but instead targeting the real culprits in the mortgage crisis: Congress. Bloomberg, who was attending a business breakfast, said he would tell Occupy Wall Street that Congress “plain and simple” caused the mortgage crisis, Capital New York first reported.


“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said of Occupy Wall Street, according to a video of the discussion. “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 have had them without that.”

But since Congress members will not take responsibility for their actions in the crisis, Bloomberg said, protesters turned to the easiest target.

“But [Congress] were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will,” Bloomberg said. “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 now trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.”

Now, the mayor said, he wants to shift the focus to the future — and he said he hopes the protesters do the same.

“But having said all of that, we’ve just got to focus on how we move and get the mortgage business and construction going, rather than why we got here and who did it,” he said. “It’s fun and it’s cathartic, it’s, I don’t know, it’s entertaining to go and to blame people and look to the past, but it doesn’t do anything for the future. And most of the protesters down there are complaining — I think they should be out there trying to change the world and make it better.”