Tuesday, Dec 09, 2008
Sound Familiar: heads I win, tails you lose
Times: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bosses blame Congress for failure
"In written testimony submitted to a hearing of the House of Representatives' Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the four former chief executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said that the lenders were pressured by Congress to ensure that lower-income families could buy homes.
At the same time, their regulator, the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight, which later became the Federal Housing Finance Agency, did little or nothing to curb their increasing exposure to riskier loans, the former chief executives claimed. "
Now where am I hearing this now ??
Posted by growler @ 08:30 PM (417 views) Add Comment
5 Comments
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1. braindeed said...
I have heard a rumor....(Fron a source inside the embrionic Obama State department)...that the Architects of CDS will go to prison - for sure. The banking heads at JPM et al are to be 'punitively' (billions in total, apparently) fined as a 'deriliction of duty' - and a world wide arm twisting is to be started to put an end to tax avoidance that 'defies the spirit' of existing legislation .
We shall see......
2. inbreda said...
Yes - living in teh channel islands (one of the dodgey tax havens that causes the UK taxpayer to pay over the odds to compensate for the absent offshored rich lot) we hear a lot about how obama is going to crack down on us. Fingers crossed he puts his money where his mouth is. Lots of locals over here are sick of being priced out by 'foreign' tax dodgers.
3. growler said...
Inbreda: Let's hope Obama is not full of beans....
Seriously though, I do agree that CDO has been the biggest self-profit-interested product - and banks and governments have been fooled when we rely on them to NOT be so gullible. Trouble is, when all is great - noone likes a spoil-sport. Especially the taxman.
4. paul said...
Well, here's the irony.
According to my understanding, as part of a 2005 regulatory overhaul of the Community Reinvestment Act, the capital curbs placed on lenders were targeted by a group of democratic party congressmen to "meet the needs of low and moderate-income persons and communities"; community leaders also lobbied to remove these restrictions for small and medium sized lenders. So the curbs were removed.
And guess who one of the most vocal congressmen was?
5. jackas said...
In 1721 the chancellor of the exchequer was jailed for allowing the south sea bubble to inflate.
How times have changed,