Frank: Fannie And Freddie Must Go

IBD Editorials ^ | August 18, 2010 | Investors Business Daily staff

[upcountryhorseman]

Frank and his boyfriend must go too!

[Lorianne]

This (Fannie and Freddie) is one of the great success stories of all time.
-Christopher Dodd

The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially.
-Barney Frank

I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government-sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis.
-Barney Frank

Some of the critics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say that the problem is that the Federal Government is obligated to bail out people who might lose money in connection with them. I do not believe that we have any such obligation.
-Barney Frank

Those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership, homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we have seen elsewhere.
-Barney Frank

This is not the dot-com situation. You will not see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.
-Barney Frannk

I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.
-Barney Frank

What happened is this: there are people who do not like affordable housing.
-Barney Frank

I am not entirely sure why we are here.
-Barney Frank

And my worry is that we’re using the recent safety and soundness concerns, particularly with Freddie, and with a poor regulator, as a straw man to curtail Fannie and Freddie’s mission.
-Charles Schumer

Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae.
-Maxine Waters

I have sat through nearly a dozen hearings where, frankly, we were trying to fix something that wasn’t broke.
-Maxine Waters

[bert]

Now that he has robbed it blind he wants to destroy the evidence. He needs to be gone, not to jail, but from this earth. He is a burden on our republic that should not be tolerated.