Responding Frank-ly—I Fire Back on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Thanks

Sam:

Enough has been said lately about Frank and his cohorts. I won't belabor the subject since I would place myself in jeopardy of having another heart attack with the rage that I would vent. I read a couple of your articles lately. I have recently bemoaned to my wife that there isn't any true journalist left. It seems that everyone has their own agenda when speaking about an issue. Thank you for proving me wrong. You must have been a fan of the old Dragnet series because you base your writing on just the facts.

Let them squirm, Sam. Let them squirm.

Nowhere to run, Barney

Great reporting, Sam. People in trouble tend to try to change the subjest, displace blame and spin things in other directions to get the pressure off of themselves. You did a great job keeping things in line in this article and keeping the important questions front and center. There's nowhere to run, Barney. Time to face the music.

Thank you for this article. I personally hold two people responsible for this disaster, Senator Dodd and Rep. Frank for stopping all real regulations on Fannie and Freddie. These two facilitated a philosophy that in the end promoted poor risk assessment loans and tempted the greedy. If Freddie and Fannie were regulated, most of these bad loans that were repackaged by them and resold to financial organizations would not have happened.

I love how everyone is sooooo concerned about who voted for what and who said whatever in the past. Nobody seems to care about what is going on now. I mean these high level accountants and CEO's and CFO's and all the the people that were part of these predatory lending practices worked hard to disguise what was going on and they paid large sums of money to make sure congressmen looked the other way. These guys are at risk to lose their bonus and severence packages for all their hard work and nobody seems to care. What if they have to give up their Jaguars and million dollar homes?

All hail the all-powerful Barney Frank

So republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and yet somehow, Barney Frank was able to derail regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? All by his lonesome? I wasn't aware that minority members of congress were granted veto power. The author never explicitly states this, but certainly implies it.

Note to Michael Curr - If you look at a timeline of housing prices and sub-prime loans originated, you'll clearly see that this was a post-2000 bubble. Go ahead and blame Clinton for the internet bubble, but the housing bubble belongs to Bush and the republican congress.

campaign donations

Wouldn't it be far more interesting, and telling, to see "in depth articles" about how many FANNIE lobbyists, who were paid not thousands, but millions to avoid regulation for Fannie Mae, actually work, currently, for self-dsecribed "Mr. Anti-Regulation" John McCain?

Just a thought.

votes and contributions

GREAT JOB SAM!

Voting Recrods can be found here:

www.votesmart.org

Campaign contributions can be found here:

www.opensecrets.org

Not surprising...

Karl

Trying to place blame where it don;t belong

Sam:

In reading your articles, it is quite obvious that Barney Franks & company(Liberal Congress)are trying to shift the blame from those who were top executives of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac to Senator Mccain's lobbyists-most of whom worked for lobbying agencis and not directly for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.

The truth is that Barney Franks and Nancy Pelosi did all they could to prevent any kind of regulation to Fannie May/Freddie Mac,despite warnings both in 2003 and in 2005 of financial impropriety and overextension of mortgage credit that suggested the mortgage giants where in over their heads.All this was done for cultural diversification,reguardless of whether anyone qualified.(CRA Act which forced banks to lower loan qualifications or loose business and credibility- passed under former President Clinton's administration)

We need to fix the problem,but we also need to be mindful of the truth.

Forget about campaign donations, I want to see who voted against the bills in 2003 and 2005. Pretty sure there will be a large number of Republicans (since it was a Republican controlled Congress) and Democrats voting against that oversight. These are the people who should be blamed.

I'd be interested to see an in depth article on members of the Senate and Congress who received campaign donations from Freddie Mac / Fannie Mae. A recent report I saw on CNN indicated that: Christopher Dodd(D), John Kerry (D), Hillary Clinton (D), Barrack Obama (D) were in the top five receiving large donations.