“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” the mayor said. “It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and to give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.” It was Congress, he continued, that “pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent; they were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”…Mr. Koch, a Democrat, praised Mr. Bloomberg’s business acumen but said he differed with him on the question of the financial crisis and the protests. “I’m Jewish, not Catholic, but I believe in punishment,” he said. Referring to the settlements paid by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to resolve claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Koch said they were just “the cost of doing business” in the view of the banks. “What do you think they got fined for — schmutz on the sidewalk?” Mr. Koch said. “They got fined because they abused their relationship with their clientele. And I want to see somebody — I want to see one of them, of a major corporation, punished criminally.” [NYT]