Fannie Book May Be A Gamechanger

[Annie]

The question is are any of the Conservatives capable of capitalizing?

Walter Russell Mead is actually a progressive, he is also pro-America though:

Fanniegate: Gamechanger For The GOP? | Via Meadia

June 7, 2011
Fanniegate: Gamechanger For The GOP?
Walter Russell Mead

Democrats, watch out.

The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction — and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener’s rogue body parts. If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle — a big if — then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981.

The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot. The villains? An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros. (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

...

I just put a hold on the one copy my library has, there are 11 holds ahead of mine. So, I called the library and they are ordering another 3 copies.

 

[Claudette]

I think I'll check with my local library to see if they have a copy.

Looks like illuminating reading.

 

[dilloduck]

It doesn't matter if you team is evil just as long as they win.

 

[whitehall]

Didn't Barney Frank admit that he had "ideological blinders" on when he told America that Fannie was doing fine while it was going under while he was House banking chairman? Why isn't there a congressional investigation into the collapse of Fannie Mae? Are democrats blocking it? It's alleged that Obama financial advisor Frank Raines cooked the Fannie books while he was CEO to show a fake profit which was tied to his bonus money that the democrats lavishly bestowed on him. Raines walked away with 90 Million dollars for three years work. The Fannie Mae board of directors were do-nothing political hacks who had no experience in financial matters. Fannie was a disaster because congress was in charge of it. Wait until "Obama-care" rolls around.

 

[Claudette]

Didn't Barney Frank admit that he had "ideological blinders" on when he told America that Fannie was doing fine while it was going under while he was House banking chairman? Why isn't there a congressional investigation into the collapse of Fannie Mae? Are democrats blocking it? It's alleged that Obama financial advisor Frank Raines cooked the Fannie books while he was CEO to show a fake profit which was tied to his bonus money that the democrats lavishly bestowed on him. Raines walked away with 90 Million dollars for three years work. The Fannie Mae board of directors were do-nothing political hacks who had no experience in financial matters. Fannie was a disaster because congress was in charge of it. Wait until "Obama-care" rolls around.

Yup. Ol'Barn did a bang up job in his role as oversite for Fannie and Freddie. He and Chris Dodd outdid themselves.

Raines is living large on that 90 million. Of course its our hard earned tax Dollars that he was payed with.

Yep good job all around by the Cowns in oversite.

 

[Toro]

I might buy this. It sounds interesting.

Gretchen Morgenson: The 'Reckless' Origins Of The Financial Meltdown : NPR

 

[boedicca]

I read the article in the OP this morning. Very interesting..think I'll purchase the book.


Named CEO of Fannie Mae (a government backed mortgage corporation) Johnson decided to make untold wealth by making and securitizing junk housing loans and by massaging the financial reports to ensure that he qualified for the obscenely generous maximum bonus no matter what was actually happening to the company under his care.

Fannie Mae, a historically staid and predictable government linked company, needed to turn into a cutting edge speculative growth engine to make the hundreds of millions Johnson wanted. Since taxpayers stand behind Fannie Mae’s debts, Johnson needed to get the politicians to back his desire to turn this milkwagon into a Porsche. Fortunately for him — and unfortunately for the country and the world — he found a way.

Fannie Mae would adopt the goal of increasing the percentage of Americans who owned their own homes, targeting the inner city poor who, allegedly, were blocked from home ownership by racial discrimination. (A bogus study to this effect was widely circulated; devastating criticisms and rebuttals quietly ignored.) This is where such luminaries of the American political scene as ACORN and La Raza get into the act. They served as cheerleaders for Johnson’s self-enrichment plan, camouflaging a Wall Street rip-off by hymning its benefits for the poor.

The purpose of no doc, no money down loans wasn’t, Heaven forbid, to generate rich fees and high interest rates for mortgage brokers and Wall Street. No, the smarmy defenders of the Great American Rip-off told us, those features were necessary to make sure that poor people (so cruelly, unfairly locked out of mortgages because they didn’t qualify for the stuffy old-fashioned kind) could participate in the American Dream. Anybody who opposed Jim Johnson’s get rich scheme was a racist who hated the poor. Political correctness married Wall Street chicanery as Maxine Waters, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank led the band; crooked accountants and clueless rating agencies performed the ceremony; big government dowered the couple with a debt guarantee and bankers dressed as flower girls showered the happy pair in a confetti of junk mortgages and junk bonds.

Fannie Mae and the housing market were off to the races — and where Fannie Mae led the way, the financial markets followed. Regulators were captured by the interests they were supposed to regulate; favors were dispensed with a lavish hand; taxpayer-provided money was used to assemble a vast lobby focused on extracting more money from hapless taxpayers to make James Johnson even richer. In the process, millions of financially unsophisticated low income people were stuck with obscenely unfair mortgages, honest whistle blowers were subjected to savage personal attacks, home prices lost all touch with reality, taxpayers were stuck with losses that may approach one trillion dollars, and financial markets were poisoned almost beyond repair.

But there’s a bright side. Mondale-Kerry-Obama confidant Johnson made a boatload of money, and Fannie Mae was able to pay many of his personal bills — at least until it went broke...


In a nutshell, career Dems colluded with corrupt player on Wall Street to financially rape the country. This book pieces together the puzzle quite well, from the summary.