Barney Frank Loves Freddie Mac

[Bill Call]

And he is rather fond of Fannie Mae.

This article in Slate is a very short overview of the genesis of the current Wall Street melt down:

http://www.slate.com/id/2107902/

Today’s Wall Street Journal had this to say:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122161010874845645.html

The Wall Street Journal has been more zealous in its oversight of these mortgage giants than the President, Congress or regulators:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1215997 ... outset-box

The bursting housing bubble is spreading chaos throughout the financial community. The only people surprised by this chaos are the Masters of The Universe who designed these debt instruments and the politicians in Washington who have lost all sanity when it comes to economic matters.

The general idea behind the mortgage backed security was that while one mortgage held by a debtor who could not pay was worthless 100,000 such mortgages have investment value as “debt instrumentsâ€

[Tim Liston]

Hey Bill have you seen the change in the price of gold today? Spot price up 10%. And mind you the "paper " price of gold is one thing. Paper gold is easy to buy, if you have the money. But try getting physical gold. Nobody is selling physical gold, or silver for that matter.

See for example: http://www.apmex.com/APMEXTop40/Default.aspx

Here's why (from Bloomberg): http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aE2E0CFl8PEU&refer=home

I guess the gold bugs figure there's gonna be a lot more paper money sloshing around. Weimer Republic indeed....

[ryan costa]

those were decent articles summarizing the immediate history of how everyone had fun acquiring or profiting from people aquiring real estate. It seems like a more sophisticated and holistic repeat of the savings and loan crisis and leveraged buyout shenanigans of the 1980s. Many savings and loans went out of business. Many formerly thriving firms that used leveraged buyouts to gain market share also collapsed: the remaining oligarchs then had too much control and too much weight to not make big waves everytime they screw up.



Here is a summary history of the causes and consequences from world war II to here.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/ ... oment.html


I'm not sure why gold is worth anything, other than enthusiasm and hysteria. if gold is 850 an ounce, one ounce is worth about 70 to 120 hours of an illegal aliens labor. how many coins can you make with one ounce of gold? I'd hate to lose them in the couch.

it is odd that so much information is recorded and tracked about each citizen in this country, yet they can't issue their own bonds directly with little or no difficulty. That seems like something all this computer stuff would have been good for 20 years ago. If a million properties are being foreclosed at 8 or 9 or higher percent interest, maybe they wouldn't be foreclosed at 4 or 5 percent interest. the yield of 30 year treasury bonds has been hovering between 4 and 5 percent. GDP growth has been and is expected to be between 1 and 4 percent. So 5 percent mortgage interest seems reasonable, so long as it isn't used to fuel speculation, sprawl, and the consistent ghetto-fication left in the wake of sprawl.

Its easier to accomplish this and prevent catastrophe when you accept that industrial growth approaches a plateau, and investing in asian tigers or globalism is what causes our present problems, not solves them.

[Bill Call]

I guess the gold bugs figure there's gonna be a lot more paper money sloshing around. Weimer Republic indeed....

Obama's key advisors are the people who use to run Fannie Mae. That illustrates nicely how government really works.

Obama never challenged the corruption of the Democratic party in Illinois and he will never challenge it in Washington DC. He'll jump right in.

[Brian Pedaci]

Not a 'key' advisor, Bill. Hardly an advisor at all.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-c ... ction.html

The McCain video attempts to link Obama to Franklin Raines, the former CEO of the bankrupt mortgage giant, Fannie Mae, who also happens to be African-American. It then shows a photograph of an elderly white woman taxpayer who has supposedly been "stuck with the bill" as a result of the "extensive financial fraud" at Fannie Mae.

The Obama campaign last night issued a statement by Raines insisting, "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." Obama spokesman Bill Burton went a little further, telling me in an e-mail that the campaign had "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter."

So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that the three items (including an editorial) all rely on the same single conversation, between Raines and a Washington Post business reporter, Anita Huslin, who wrote a profile of the discredited Fannie Mae boss that appeared on July 16. The profile reported that Raines, who retired from Fannie Mae four years ago, had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

The Pinocchio Test

The McCain campaign is clearly exaggerating wildly in attempting to depict Franklin Raines as a close adviser to Obama on "housing and mortgage policy." If we are to believe Raines, he did have a couple of telephone conversations with someone in the Obama campaign. But that hardly makes him an adviser to the candidate himself--and certainly not in the way depicted in the McCain video release.

Shall we have a talk about who McCain's key economic advisors are? Carly Fiorina, who ran HP so well that she was fired by the board. Phil Gramm, who was a tireless proponent of deregulation in the banking industry and who called those who are suffering the results 'whiners', and thinks we're only going through a 'mental recession'.

[Bill Call]

Not a 'key' advisor, Bill. Hardly an advisor at all.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-c ... ction.html

The writers for the Washington Post tell us that you should not believe what you read in the Washington Post. It seems good advice.

So what do we know about Barack Obama and Fannie Mae?

We know that over the years Fannie Mae transferred millions of dollars to community activist groups like ACORN, La Raza and others. We know that Obama worked closely with ACORN as a community organizer. We know that the Obama campaign transferred at least $800,000 in campaign contributions to ACORN. We know that a web of left wing activist groups funded by Fannie Mae serve the needs of Democratic Party activists in general and the needs of Barack Obama in particular. Are we to believe that the Obama has no contact with the people who controlled the money?

It seems unlikely that Obama would accept Fannie Mae's money but not Fannie Mae’s advice.

Even though the writers for the Washington Post tell us not to believe what we read in the Washington Post you this is interesting:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trai ... raise.html

The article says that it is a little disingenuous to say that people who were in charge of this VP selection process were not part of his campaign.

Barack Obama never challenged the corruption in the Illinois Democratic Party and never challenged the corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. To the contrary, he immersed himself in that environment.

[Stephen Eisel]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... i_14779796

Assault on the mortgage lenders: in the name of racial justice, the Clintonites want the power to decide who gets a home of his own - efforts to impose regulations on banks to make loans even if applicants are not creditworthy and the flood gates were open...