Fannie Mae, in the dining room, with the revolver?

Yahoo News wrote:

Before taking that job, Kellerman served as senior vice president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer

Do I smell a breaking scandal???

fnord wrote:

Where were Bill and Hillary?  If a Rose Law Firm or Whitewater connection can be found, they need to be hauled in and waterboarded to protect our way of life!

Man, can't Obama come up with his own hit squad? Why does have have to bogart the Clinton's hitters with the same old tired, "suicide" m.o.?

You'd think, coming from Chicago politics, Obama would have quite the plethora of goons already on the payroll (aside from Rahm Emanuel).

As long as he's dead, who gives a shit. (golf claps around)

ptah13 wrote:

GooberMcNutly wrote:

Where is Dick Cheney?

I heard Barney Frank announced that the collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman bros. was caused by conservative policies of forcing lending institutions to loan money to people not qualified.

Maybe Dick was trying to cover it all up!

No, they were forced to offer the same deals to the qualified applicants; it was their failed attempt to replicate PIMCO's models using unqualified applicants that killed us off.

orangeplus wrote:

Source?

Tavis Smiley's show on PBS.

Here is the relevant direct Barney Frank quotes (if this ain't lying, or at least massive misleading, I don't know what is):

Barney:  It was a conservative view that rental housing was a bad thing.  I have been trying to continue programs to build descent rental housing.

What we had were in people in power who didn't like that, and they said no, no, we'll help them become homeowners.

People were pushing home ownership who shouldn't have been there.  We have now, in Barack Obama, a president who understands this.  But if you are low income in America, if you're poor, you probably are not going to be able to afford a home.

Yep, there you have it. The conservatives in power are who actually made it possible for people who can't afford homes to buy them. There you go! Because, in the world of liberals, no matter how big a lie it is, if you say it on TV, it is suddenly "the truth".

From now on, I'll point these out as "new truths". They didn't use to be true, but someone said it on TV so it is now (much like with the Tea Parties and MSNBC).

Sorry, back to rush-to-judgement... As I said, Cheney did it because he wanted to cover up the secret that he'd been actually HELPING the poor attain housing, and is a big softie, over the past 8 years. He can't let anything mess up his street cred, now.

Fled wrote:

From now on, I'll point these out as "new truths". They didn't use to be true, but someone said it on TV so it is now (much like with the Tea Parties and MSNBC).

Thank you, thank you, thank you Ptah.  Without you we would all remain ignorant and lost.  I forgot that it was "Barney" (I did not realize you were friends) that coined the expression "ownership society."  You seem loathe to admit that both sides of the spectrum happily conspired to push the idea that "American Dream" applied to all. 

Barney Frank talks so much that all possible combinations of words ultimately come out of his mouth (as opposed to what comes into his mouth).  I have no doubt that he actively promoted home ownership for people at the low-income end of the spectrum, so you need not repeat what you have already repeated too many times.  But you must admit that much of the fuel behind the unwise lending came from the lenders themselves and their political support.

Actually, I "must admit" that the RIGHT predicted this would happen years ago and were against Lehman Bros, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I find it funny that, whenever the left screws up, the left try so desperately hard to say, "hey, BOTH SIDES made this mistake", like when we were discussing Blago and the huge history of dirty Dems in Chicago and someone claimed that "well, in Illinois it isn't just the Republicans who are crooks". Which, is funny. Yeah, you got a Repub governor in jail but that hardly balances out the history of Illinois politics to 50/50, or even 90/10.

I don't blame you. If I supported the party of the Clintons and, now, the Chicago Machine, I'd try and claim every one of my parties past failures as being a failure by all. I just bitch about how hypocritical you all are. In your eyes, Republicans are these inherently "evil" bunch, who are all bad, whereas Dems can do whatever they want and you all will either justify it or pawn it off under the, "well they are all bad in this instance" claim.

Sorry, but it was the Clinton administration that pushed for the laxed lending for the poor, not the right. If you want to argue this point, I can put up some videos of meetings between Democrats and Republicans where Republicans are saying that these institutions are (were) going to collapse and Democrats are basically laughing at Republicans for making the claim. I can post video of Bush saying these institutions need oversight (wow, must be bad for a Republican to call for MORE regulation of a bank), yet was ignored and lampooned by the media.

How much crow would you like me to dish on this subject? For Barney Frank, who is a complete moron, to claim that "conservatives forced banks to loan money to unqualified people" is way beyond laughable.

Last edited by ptah13 (2009-04-23 11:41:22)

ptah13 wrote:

How much crow would you like me to dish on this subject? For Barney Frank, who is a complete moron, to claim that "conservatives forced banks to loan money to unqualified people" is way beyond laughable.

I take it you've never heard of the Ownership Society?

Last edited by tojo2000 (2009-04-23 17:21:39)

That's all fine and dandy - but the mortgages are only a symptom of this crisis.  The CDS's we paid off via AIG were bets on standard fixed income corporate bonds.

The cheap money wasn't just in the housing market, it was everywhere.  Some hedge funds were levered more than 40 times the value of their holdings. 

By allowing the banks to merge to infinity and beyond we created histories largest financial sinkhole.  The problem really wasn't loosened lending, it was mass consilidation followed by unregulated lending by the same firms that securitized the loans and then bought insurance against those loans.

But the end of the day it was merger mania - the strange idea that we could increase competition by reducing the number of competitors and that these new super-entities would compete internally against themselves. 

Oh and that they would police themselves also.

Ptah, meet Phred.  Phred, meet Ptah.   Just talk to each other.

Hairbrainers, not harbingers.

Actually, I "must admit" that the RIGHT predicted this would happen years ago and were against Lehman Bros, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I find it funny that, whenever the left screws up, the left try so desperately hard to say, "hey, BOTH SIDES made this mistake", like when we were discussing Blago and the huge history of dirty Dems in Chicago and someone claimed that "well, in Illinois it isn't [i]just the Republicans who are crooks". Which, is funny. Yeah, you got a Repub governor in jail but that hardly balances out the history of Illinois politics to 50/50, or even 90/10. [/i]

Interesting rhetoric, smurgling from financial issues to Illinois politics.  To stay on topic for a moment, your belief that the economic crisis was created by democrats alone is both laughable and sad.  The global economy was on a leverage binge, jerry-rigging as many exotic devices, investment vehicles and contrivances as possible to increase available capital.  The result was a pyramid of risks that was unmanageable.  When the bottom cards began to fall out, the house collapsed.  You have to put blinders on to pin everything on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  They did not cause Bear Stearns' or Lehman Brothers' problems.  They did not make the investment and borrowing decisions for them, nor did they for Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, AIG or anyone else.  Those companies were or are controlled by grown ups who were not controlled by democrats any more than they were by republicans. 

Note that I do not single out the republicans for all blame even though they controlled the executive branch during the seven years leading up to the collapse.  The blame permeates the entire power structure, public and private.  You want to cherry-pick, and I think we will never understand what has happened if we do that.  Also note that I am not defending Barney Frank's role in this.  He talks out of his ass half the time.  But so do you.

wrote:

Illinois Politics

To compare anything to Illinois politics is absurd.  It is a critter onto itself.

Fled wrote:

Note that I do not single out the republicans for all blame even though they controlled the executive branch during the seven years leading up to the collapse.  The blame permeates the entire power structure, public and private.  You want to cherry-pick, and I think we will never understand what has happened if we do that.  Also note that I am not defending Barney Frank's role in this.  He talks out of his ass half the time.  But so do you.

Actually, let's roll it back a little.  I was a Jarhead when Reagan was the man, (and a hell of a man he was).  But at the point he took over you could not buy a car on credit, get a credit card or buy a McMansion without co-signers.  At the beginning of my second hitch I couldnt buy a $5k used car with 50% down because I lacked established credit; six months later I was offered "first time buyers" deals on new cars at 3 times that price and credit cards for the asking.

Cheap money created this problem; irresponsible lending and it goes back 32 years.

Extrapolate the GDP vs indexes vs credit over that period and you might begin to get a clue to the under-pinnings of this disaster.