Free Republic

Media propagandists continue to advance the Democratic Party line. On December 21, Bloomberg News breathlessly reported, "The leading Republican candidates for president have embraced an explanation of the financial crisis that has been rejected by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, many economists and even three of the four Republicans on the government commission that investigated the meltdown." Reporter David J. Lynch further explained, "Both former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney lay much of the blame on U.S. government housing policies, saying they led to the real estate crash that almost brought down the banking...

The U.S. government-run mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could play a bigger role in turning around the battered U.S. housing market, the Federal Reserve told Congress, a call that looks set to run into stiff political opposition. The Fed, in a paper sent to lawmakers on Wednesday, outlined an array of steps that could be taken to help the housing sector, including allowing Fannie and Freddie to provide cheaper mortgages to a broader pool of homeowners. The two companies, the biggest sources of U.S. mortgage funding, were seized by the government in 2008 when they were on...

Democrats have spent years arguing that private lenders created the housing boom and bust, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac merely came along for the ride. This was always a politically convenient fiction, and now thanks to the unlikely source of the Securities and Exchange Commission we have a trail of evidence showing how the failed mortgage giants turbocharged the crisis. That's the story revealed Friday by the SEC's civil lawsuits against six former Fannie and Freddie executives, including a pair of CEOs. The SEC says the companies defrauded investors because they "knew and approved of misleading statements" about...

DECEMBER 17, 2011 Gingrich of Freddie Mac The Speaker's defense is hurting him as much as his $1.6 million payday. Newt Gingrich's opponents aren't letting up in their criticism of his lucrative ties to the failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he resigned as House Speaker in the late 1990s. More damaging to his Presidential candidacy is that Mr. Gingrich doesn't seem to understand why anyone is offended. In his first response after news broke that he'd made $300,000 working for Freddie, Mr. Gingrich claimed he had "offered them advice on precisely what they didn't do." As a "historian," he...

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought civil fraud charges against six former top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying they misled the government and taxpayers about risky subprime mortgages the mortgage giants held during the housing bust. Those charged include the agencies' two former CEOs, Fannie's Daniel Mudd and Freddie's Richard Syron. They are the highest-profile individuals to be charged in connection with the 2008 financial crisis. Mudd, 53, and Syron, 68, led the mortgage giants when the housing bubble burst in late 2006 and 2007. The four other top executives also worked for the...

NEW YORK—The Securities and Exchange Commission sued several former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, including their former chief executives, alleging they misrepresented to investors their exposure to subprime mortgage loans.

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...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, story here .

I was only 15 in 1994, when Newt Gingrich experienced his last great moment. (Well, before this one, where he’s surging in the polls, with his campaign having figured out how to run for President.) So I don’t really remember Newt’s glory days. I have interviewed him on many occasions, however, as far back as 2006 and as recently as last month, and every time we talk, I’m struck by how smart he is. Despite that, I can’t get past the nagging voice in my head telling me that no matter how good he would be at running the country,...

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 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...

Especially since Mr. Gingrich was never a natural Freddie antagonist anyway. As big-government libertarian, he rather liked the idea of subsidizing homeownership. He also collected millions from health-care interests, and he supported a version of the individual health insurance mandate. These were once respectable ideas in GOP circles. Yet the inconvenient fact remains: Mr. Gingrich had placed himself, from the perspective of 2011, on the wrong side of the housing policy debate.

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...

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.