Free Republic

The Fannie model worked for over 50 years. And the Freddie Model worked for decades.

The government has pulled roughly even with the private sector as a source of home mortgages and consumer credit, with both financing $6.4 trillion in outstanding loans last quarter, Federal Reserve data show. This represents a dramatic reversal from 2006, when private-sector financing supplied nearly $2 in outstanding home mortgages and consumer credit for every $1 of government-financed loans.

"Barney Frank: I've destroyed the economy, my work here is done." — Washington Times headline, Nov. 29 It was quite a confluence of news last week when in the span of hours came Rep. Frank's retirement announcement, a report on declining housing prices and home-ownership rates, and a poll belaboring the obvious about Americans' fears about the housing and stock markets. With his fellow Democrat, former Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., shoulders much of the blame for today's economic catastrophe and the fiscal crises plaguing governments at all levels. They spent years pushing policies that ultimately required...

The folks at Club for Growth has white papers on all the GOP candidates summarizing their public records and does a pretty objective job. Looking at Newt's I really was struck by how conservative Newt's actual voting record was (which of course was mischaracterized by Jennifer Rubin, who I think must have been offered a post in a Romney administration. How else do you explain her going full spittle in support of Romney and anti-Newt?)., with most of the worrisome aspects of his record coming from speeches AFTER he left public office. This is pretty much the exact opposite of...

With the Republican field’s first major test just weeks away, the failed presidential bid of Herman Cain is throwing his support behind the current frontrunner. Sources told Fox 5 Atlanta that Herman Cain will endorse the presidential bid of Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Several sexual harassment allegations and a claim of a long-term affair left the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO’s White House bid all but destroyed.

Newt Gingrich made headlines in October because he suggested that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should go to jail for authoring the so-called Dodd-Frank banking reforms. Taken together the “landmark” reforms look a lot like an Obama speech: very wordy, very partisan, but full of inaction, cross-purposes and the typical liberal confusion about economics, society and man. The legislation crafted by Dodd and Frank has reformed none of the systemic failures in our banking system, but it sure has made it harder for banks to loan money, or for you and me to buy a house. Much of the failure...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, story here .

The White House has released this statement on Barney Frank's retirement from President Obama, who has been meeting with European Union leaders since around noon: "This country has never had a Congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him. For over 30 years, Barney has been a fierce advocate for the people of Massachusetts and Americans everywhere who needed a voice. He has worked tirelessly on behalf of families and businesses and helped make housing more affordable. He has stood up for the rights of LGBT Americans and fought to end discrimination...

Obama has less than one year to boost his ratings, and the latest housing bail-out plan is part of his campaign. But will it work in the long run? Let’s take a look. HARP 2.0 (Home Affordable Refinance Program) launched this week with the hopes of helping at least 1 million underwater borrowers refinance into today’s low rates, even if they owe much more on their home than it’s currently worth. While the rules are less stringent than the original not-so-effective HARP program, it still won’t save enough underwater homeowners from losing their homes. Why? 1). It only applies to...

Local lawmakers believe more federal demolition funds must be found to stop the dramatic drop in northeast Ohio property values. Former Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis said he believes the number of condemned homes and buildings in northeast Ohio has ballooned to 30,000. Rokakis blamed foreclosures and irresponsible banks, investment firms and individuals who have walked away or ignored their distressed properties. The growth in vacant houses comes at a time when federal neighborhood stabilization funds, used to demolish these homes, will soon run dry. Rokakis said vacant homes are one of the leading causes of a dramatic drop in...

I can’t understand why Newt Gingrich is getting such a pass on his Freddie Mac consulting. He claims to have been a historian for this outfit? FHLMC needs a historian like the U.S.A. needs a Department of Education, like Europe needs a common currency, like … like … I dunno, like Michelle Obama needs another $12,000 accessory. I sputtered about this on last week’s Radio Derb: Newt’s trying to ju-jitsu the thing, telling us that his experience as a shill for Freddie Mac gave him valuable insider understanding of governmental affairs. Isn’t that what we want in a candidate, valuable...

The FBI warned in September 2004 that there was an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial “crisis” if it were not contained. The mortgage banking industry’s own anti-fraud experts reported in writing to nearly every mortgage lender in 2006 that: “Stated income and reduced documentation loans speed up the approval process, but they are open invitations to fraudsters.” ....stated income loans deserve the nickname used by many in the industry, the ‘liar’s loan’”. We know that accounting control fraud is itself criminogenic – fraud begets fraud. The fraudulent CEOs deliberately create the perverse incentives...

The real cause of the housing bubble and collapse is very simple: An Executive Order by Bill Clinton and enthusiastically championed by George Bush, 13166, forced banks to make bad loans or no loans at all. And Newt Gingrich was championing putting an end to EO 13166 years before the collapse of the banking industry. In the late 1990s, a grand compromise was reached between President Clinton and Senate Banking Chairman Phil Gramm. Long ago, government types decided that home ownership was the key to fiscal stability, but too many blacks didn't qualify for loans. The banking industry argued that...

It took a $142 billion taxpayer bailout to convince the Obama Administration to pledge in February to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rein in the Federal Housing Administration and encourage the revival of a private mortgage market. So it's distressing to see Congress move in exactly the opposite direction less than a year later, with the quiet approval of the White House. While cable TV is chasing the trivia of Fannie and Freddie bonuses, the real news is that late Monday a bipartisan Congressional committee announced an agreement to increase FHA's maximum mortgage limits to $729,750 from $625,500...

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is stepping up his defense of his lucrative consulting career, in part by arguing that he didn’t do very much to earn all that money. In an interview late Thursday on Fox News, Gingrich said that he only worked about an hour a month giving advice to Freddie Mac, the quasi-public mortage company that paid him up to $1.8 million in fees.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday that he's trying to figure out how much money he made from controversial housing giant Freddie Mac and suggested he may release the information as early as Friday. Gingrich's comments, in an interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, represent the latest shift in his campaign's response to a Bloomberg News story earlier this week that said the former House speaker made as much as $1.6 million from Freddie. Initially, the Gingrich campaign promised to release details about the payment, then appeared to back off that pledge. Freddie Mac and its sister quasi-governmental...

Ethics: As Democrats demonize Wall Street CEOs as the "greedy" fiends of the financial crisis, they've lined their own pockets — both before and after the crisis. Nancy Pelosi's just the latest example. The former House speaker allegedly gamed financial reforms to boost her personal stock portfolio. The brewing scandal is complicated, but here's the Reader's Digest version: After a Pelosi staffer left to lobby on behalf of credit-card giant Visa, Pelosi delayed bringing to the House floor a bill to end lucrative "swipe fees" for Visa and other credit providers. The bill couldn't have come at a worse time...

Newt Gingrich spent the last decade being paid by big business to convince conservatives to support big-government policies that would profit his clients. Gingrich's consulting firm racked up $1.6 million in fees from the government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac, we learned this week from Bloomberg News. Gingrich's job was to help Freddie Mac win over conservatives to this market-distorting, bubble-fueling, housing-subsidy entity, which is now officially owned by the federal government. We also know that Growth Energy, an ethanol lobby, paid $312,500 to the Gingrich Group in 2009, according to the group's tax filing. Growth Energy lobbies to preserve many ethanol...

Rep. Michele Bachmann hit former Speaker Newt Gingrich hard on Wednesday for receiving consulting fees from mortgage giant Freddie Mac, but it turns out Bachmann herself received campaign contributions from The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation’s (Freddie Mac) political action committee during the 2007-2008 cycle. “While [Gingrich] was taking that money, I was fighting against Fannie and Freddie,” Bachmann said on Wednesday. It turns out that while she was “fighting” them, she was also taking their money.

I mean, he was the picture of righteous indignation. But when it comes to the millions of dollars in compensation, regular and bonus, paid to executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) that were at the very center of the sub-prime mortgage-bundling that poisoned the financial system and took down companies such as AIG, Obama’s outrage is… strangely mute. (SNIP) And yet now, instead of being spun-off as wholly private enterprises or just shut down, and while they are still being bailed out by billions in taxpayer dollars, their executives are being rewarded with tens...