The Paperboy
Times Square
- Thread starter
- #21
McCain's Economic Adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors. And that, my friends, is why everything's falling apart. That is why the taxpayers are now on the hook for the follies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns and now the insurance giant AIG to the tune of $700 billion.
This is true and certainly didn't help things.
But keep in mind Fannie Mae, led by Franklin Raines, cooked the books and in essence duped Wall Street into thinking the securities were far more valuable then they were.
I would wager that Franklin Raines will do prison time at some point for fraud as he collected HUGE bonuses based on cooked books.
The domino that seemed to be the first to fall was Fannie Mae.
I think you will find that there was plenty of stupidity to go around but that criminal acts were committed by Raines, Johnson, etc.
And it also seems Obama (along with lots of other but not McCain) were in the pocket of Fannie.