Six of the candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination took the stage on Wednesday night in Las Vegas for their last debate before Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday.
Here is how the candidates’ remarks stacked up against the truth.
WHAT THE FACTS ARE:
Senator Elizabeth Warren highlighted past comments by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg that derided women.
WHAT MS. WARREN SAID:
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”
This is mostly true. In 1990, Mr. Bloomberg’s colleagues at his financial data firm compiled a book of one-liners purportedly uttered by their boss, including a number of bawdy and sexist comments. Among the quotes was a quip about the British royals, in which Mr. Bloomberg used the terms “horsey-faced lesbian” and “fat broad” to refer to two female members of the Royal Family.
In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg dismissed the book of quotes as “Borscht Belt jokes.” He has never explicitly admitted to having said the quotes in the book. Last year, though, a Bloomberg spokesman, Stu Loeser, issued a general comment about Mr. Bloomberg’s history of misogynist comments, saying: “Mike has come to see that some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong. He believes his words have not always aligned with his values and the way he has led his life.”
What the Facts Are:
Ms. Warren said Mr. Bloomberg had blamed the 2008 financial crisis on African Americans and Latinos.
What Ms. Warren said:
“When Mayor Bloomberg was busy blaming African-Americans and Latinos for the housing crash of 2008, I was right here in Las Vegas literally just a few blocks down the street holding hearings on the banks that were taking away homes from millions of families.”
This is exaggerated. Mr. Bloomberg’s comments were made in 2008 as the subprime mortgage crisis was pulling the country into the biggest economic slowdown since the Great Depression. Asked to explain the origins of the crisis in an appearance at Georgetown University, Mr. Bloomberg linked it to federal interference in the mortgage lending business and a wide variety of other factors like “very cheap money” in the form of low Federal Reserve interest rates, a failure by banks to consider that home prices could fall, and developers that built more houses than the market could absorb.
Where his critics have focused, however, is on the first part of his 8-minute answer. He started his answer off by saying the present economic woes began when “there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone.” He then pointed to legislation passed by Congress to end the practice known as “redlining,” in which banks declared entire neighborhoods off limits to lending. These were usually poor, heavily minority communities.
“Once you started pushing in that direction,” he added, “banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
Adding more unpredictability to the situation, he said, were bankers and Wall Street executives who had created such complex instruments to profit from mortgages that they did not, in essence, understand what they were selling.
Fact checks by Michael M. Grynbaum and Jeremy W. Peters.