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The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Fair Game They Left Fannie Mae, but We Got the Legal Bills By GRETCHEN MORGENSON PRECISELY one year ago, we lucky taxpayers took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants that contributed mightily to the wild and crazy home-loan-boom-turned-bust. In that rescue operation, the Treasury agreed to pony up as much as $200 billion to keep Fannie in the black, coughing up cash whenever its liabilities exceed its assets. According to the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement, the Treasury will, by Sept. 30, have handed over $45 billion to shore up the company’s net worth. It...

Bill Haling: Where’s the outrage? President Obama has been in office just 60 days and we have tripled the nation’s debt. Wow! All those that voted for change certainly got it — along with the rest of the taxpayers. Everyone knows this depression is Bush’s fault. “Give the stimulus time!” is the response. The Bush depression will take time for the Democrats to rescue this country. How long will it take for our children and grandchildren to pay for the excesses? Any outrage? The news of AIG paying $165 million in executive bonuses has certainly created a lot of media...

Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac of the Chicago Tribune report that, while researching what went at Freddie Mac during the period White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel served on the government sponsored enterprise’s board of directors, they were unable to get minutes of board meetings and other information: The Obama administration rejected a Tribune request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel’s time as a director. The documents, obtained by Falcon for his investigation, were “commercial information” exempt from disclosure, according to a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency....

Franklin D. Raines, the former chief executive of Fannie Mae, used a special program at mortgage lender Countrywide Financial to receive a below-market rate on a home loan, contrary to sworn testimony he made to Congress in December, according to the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) released documents yesterday that he said show Raines received discounts and waivers of fees on a June 2003 home loan through the "Friends of Angelo" program, named after Countrywide's then-chief executive, Angelo R. Mozilo.

It seems making big bucks at the expense of failing lenders was perfectly OK for FOB (friends of Barry) but it is not OK for current bankers to make anything over $500,000. Obama insists limits to bankers should be $500,000.KGorelick earned an estimated $26,000,000 serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003The Clinton administration's White House Budget Director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected $50,000,000. Jamie Gorelick — Clinton Justice Department official — worked for Fannie and took home $26,000,000. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama's VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie...

Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs): An Institutional Overview is one of thousands of documents recently made available on WikiLeaks. A veritable myriad of Congressional Research Service documents offer startling glimpses into the scale and scope of government intrusion in the free markets. Why Did Congress Create GSEs? GSEs were not created for the purpose of expanding home ownership by lower- and middle-income members of the public. Rather, Congress established GSEs "to improve the efficiency of capital markets" and to overcome "statutory and other market imperfections which otherwise prevent funds from moving easily from suppliers of funds to areas of high loan...

Freddie and Fannie still brokeAn Editorial February 03, 2009 Freddie Mac, the quasi-federal outfit that Cong. Barney Frank guaranteed us was solvent, needs $35 billion more in taxpayer aid, according to Bloomberg News. The company got $13.8 billion from taxpayers in November. So far Treasury officials have pledged as much as $100 billion each to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae since Frank's indignant guarantee that both were financially healthy. Frank's emotional endorsement of the two mortgage giants came after officials of the George W. Bush Administration questioned their viability two years ago. The companies have posted five consecutive quarters of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Four men who led mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and (FNM.P) Freddie Mac (FRE.P) were called before a U.S. House of Representatives panel on Tuesday and chided for making irresponsible loans that fueled a housing crisis and helped push the economy into recession. "The CEOs of Fannie and Freddie made reckless bets that led to the downfall of their companies. Their actions could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman said. The committee reviewed over 400,000 documents, many that passed through the hands of Daniel Mudd, the...

I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS FROSTY THE SNOWMAN LET IT SNOW I SAW MAXINE KISSING FRANKLIN RAINES (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus)

18-Nov-2008 Notice of Delisting or Failure to Satisfy a Cont Item 3.01 Notice of Delisting or Failure to Satisfy a Continued Listing Rule or Standard; Transfer of Listing. (a) On November 12, 2008, Fannie Mae (formally, the Federal National Mortgage Association) received a notice from the New York Stock Exchange (the "NYSE") that we had failed to satisfy one of the NYSE's standards for continued listing of our common stock. Specifically, the NYSE advised us that we were "below criteria" for the Exchange's price criteria for common stock because the average closing price of our common stock during the 30...

The wide-ranging criminal investigation into wrongdoing at Countrywide - once the nation's largest mortgage originator - now includes serious scrutiny of a loan program that provided special mortgage deals to the well-connected and powerful, including two U.S. senators. NBC News has learned that Robert Feinberg - a former Countrywide loan officer who handled what were known as the "VIP" mortgages - spent six hours last Thursday with a six-person team from the Justice Department. The team included prosecutors from the Public Integrity section, which handles investigations of possible public corruption. "The Justice Department is making very serious inquiry into any...

So far we know that the meltdown of Frannie and Freddie, abetted by Wall Street greed, caused the larger financial panic. Yet, there is little outrage that a Franklin Raines or Jim Johnson gave money to oversight members of Congress, hid behind a mantle of political-correctness in boasting about home ownership for everyone, and then cooked the books and borrowed to the hilt to justify mega-bonuses for themselves and their friends. I don’t think a special prosecutor will ever look into the maze of conflict of interest problems of a Barney Frank, or the political associations of a Franklin Raines,...

Worse than the AIG Spa Vacation (updated)Thomas Lifson October 09, 2008 The last few days we have been treated to hyperventilation over the outrage of AIG executives attending a lavish sales incentive meeting at a ritzy California spa. I hope that Henry Waxman and his committee will be evenhanded in exposing this outrage. But I bet they will ignore Raines. Franklin Raines, the Democrat who inflated Fannie Mae earnings in order to pay himself fabulous bonuses, earning $90 million dollars, is feeling none of the real estate market pain he helped to create for so many others. The Washingtonian reports:...

Breibart has the Audio HERE! http://www.breitbart.tv/html/192383.html Not sure who this host is, but ti just got put at the top of the center column on DRUDGE. "[Franklin] Raines, who you're talking about, worked for Fannie Mae, was there for a while. The only connection that people could bring up about Raines and Barack Obama is that they both are African-American, other than that there is nothing."

I have seen an email circulation about three Obama insiders being past Fannie Mae looters (my term).

During the, "Turmoil in the Financial Markets, Panel 1, hearings on AIG," Rep Chris Shays followed up his comments yesterday about Democrats refusal to investigate Fannie and Freddie, calling them the, "Toxic Twins," which should be the center of the investigation, not an afterthought. "We can't wait until Halloween to investigate these two failed monsters," he said. He also goes into detail on the accounting fraud and money Raines made while CEO. Link is C-SPAN video of Shays' remarks.

I cannot source this, but I heard the other day that Ms. Gorelick had worked for Fannie may at a salary of a little over $500,000 and left with $26,000,000 in bonuses. The bio on her website says she was Vice Chair of Fannie Mae from 1997 to 2003. She is a Harvard elitist (see link below). Jamie GorelickApparently she did a horrible job and left with a 26 million dollar bonus. To me, something just doesn't look right here. I think there should be a thorough investigation to see if any laws were broken and if she (and Franklin...

...Ten years ago, for example, the typical conforming mortgage required a down payment of 10 to 20 percent, and low-down payment mortgages were considered too risky. But then we helped to standardize the 3 to 5 percent down payment loan, brought it to global capital markets, and made it available to lenders and communities nationwide. Now low-down payment loans are commonplace. And we just adopted a new variance in our underwriting standards that will make the $500 down payment loan widely available as well... In 1994, we pledged to provide $1 trillion in capital to ten million underserved families by...

MIDI - NEVER RAINS IN CALIFORNIA

The government probe into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac widened as the mortgage giants disclosed yesterday they are under investigation by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The companies, which were seized by the government three weeks ago, said that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the SEC have opened investigations over accounting, disclosure and corporate governance matters relating to events dating to Jan. 1, 2007.

The financial crisis has boiled over. The Democrats who tried to hid it took a beating in yesterday’s vote on the 700 billion dollar bailout of the mortgage industry. They have no one but other Democrats to blame. This whole crisis was created, lock stock and barrel by greedy arrogant Democrats in and around the Clinton administration. They created Fannie Mae, the quasi public corporation, to deliver mortgage money to many poor White and minority voters. They gave our money away to insure mortgages for far too many clients who could not pay for their new homes. Nevertheless, this meant...

The Truth Does Not Lie - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Invest in Democrats The VIDEO Originally Published by Lindsay Renick Mayer on July 16, 2008 5:27 PM The federal government recently announced that it will come to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two embattled mortgage buyers that for years have pursued a lobbying strategy to get lawmakers on their side. Both companies have poured money into lobbying and campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties and committees as a general tactic, but they've also directed those contributions strategically. In the 2006 election cycle, Fannie Mae was giving...

New Media pundits have been forthright when presenting well-investigated stories concerning Barack Obama and John McCain. While the alphabet biased media fawned over Obama, who marketed himself as a candidate who transcends race and represented a new brand of politics, others looked for the truth. As it turns out, the New Media found that Obama is just another disingenuous politician. He is a packaged and pretentiously scripted candidate created by the DNC. Obama’s promises are nothing but the oily words of a swindler.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles is investigating the so-called "Friends of Angelo" loan program at Countrywide Financial, under which influential borrowers received preferential terms on home loans. The reported borrowers under the program have included U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin Raines, and California state appeals court judge Richard Aldrich.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles is investigating the so-called "Friends of Angelo" loan program at Countrywide Financial, under which influential borrowers received preferential terms on home loans. The reported borrowers under the program have included U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin Raines, and California state appeals court judge Richard Aldrich. Today's Journal: Countrywide loans on preferential terms to influential figures are the subject of a federal grand jury investigation in Los Angeles, according to people involved in the inquiry. Prosecutors subpoenaed records of many of the so-called...

Fannie Mae CEOs Raines, Johnson got exemptions from standard requirements. Two Barack Obama advisers, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, received preferential home loans as industry favors, apparently in deference to their executive positions heading Fannie Mae. Raines and Johnson, as "friends of Angelo Mozilo," the chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corp. ...were funneled millions of dollars for personal home loans. Mozilo himself made exceptions from Countrywide policy to provide the two Fannie Mae CEO's "sweetheart deals." Countrywide was acquired by Bank of America in January in an emergency rescue ... Johnson earned $21 million in just his last year at...

AP: FBI Investigating Fannie, Freddie, Lehman & AIG

Those behind market crisis should be punished: Sarkozy 1 hour, 39 minutes ago Those responsible for the crisis that has swept global financial markets should be punished, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said overnight in his first reaction to the latest bout of economic turmoil. In an acceptance speech at an award ceremony attended by U.S. and French business leaders, Sarkozy called for the "truth" on the crisis to be uncovered. "Today, millions of people across the world fear for their savings, for their apartment, for the funds they have put in banks. It is our duty to give them clear...

May 26, 2006 Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for...

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? WHERE’S THE CLAMMORING FOR DISMISSALS? WHERE ARE THE INVESTIGATIONS BY CONGRESS?Remember Enron? When all the bad news came out about Enron, the media was clammoring for resignations, interviews, trashing the CEOs, etc.On the opposite of the spectrum we now have Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Where is the outrage over what these CEOs did? Where are the investigations by Congressional Committees?I see a very different picture here. What about all of you?It is 180 degrees different and I want to know why. Why was McCain’s bill in 2005 on Fannie Mae/Fannie Mac not passed?We need Bill McCollum’s...

NOTE: this is from several years ago with a 2006 update. Raines actually made $90 million. ================================================================== Proving you can fool most of the people most of the time until you get caught, Franklin Raines, who reigned for 5 years following Clinton's appointing him as CEO of Fannie Mae, the US' quasi-governmental mortgage house, has been ousted. There are several ongoing investigations of Fannie Mae's operations and accounting practices covering the last 5 years in order to determine when accounting irregularities started and the magnitude of the financial shortfalls. Current estimates indicate that there was a $9 billion misstatement of...

Archive for Friday, October 01, 1999 Fannie Mae Moves to Loosen Home Loan Credit Rules By Daryl Strickland October 01, 1999 in print edition C-1 The nation’s largest provider of mortgage funds, moving to increase homeownership among minorities and low-income citizens, unveiled a program Thursday to loosen lending standards for people with “slightly impaired” credit. The Federal National Mortgage Assn. said it will encourage banks and other financial institutions to accept borrowers with blemished credit who may not otherwise qualify for conventional loans. The program will begin on a pilot basis in 15 states, including California, and the District of...

And let’s not forget Barack himself! This is the first portion of mandatory reading. I am posting just a teaser, but please take the time to read the info and email the link to everyone in your address book. (H/T Ace) As an executive at Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines illegally coerced his employees to falsify accounting facts so he’d get a maximum bonus. The government-backed firm used Enron-like fraud, in part at Raines’s orders, to create the largest bail-out in US history. Raines had the whistleblower fired. From the Heritage Foundation: In 2004, after a tip from a whistle blower...

Raines Stains September 19, 2008 Karen Tumulty’s article in TIME is way over the line. She spins her own web about McCain’s intentions and declares him a racist. An unsavory association pointed out between two black men is not racism. It is, in this case, a reality. The point of McCain’s ad is that Senator Obama is relying on advice from the man that nearly brought down Fannie Mae. The ONLY thing that has to do with race is the fact that both men are black. Well, one of them is half black. So what about the facts of the...

An ill-timed -- for Obama -- profile of former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, forced out in an accounting mess a few years ago. The Style Section piece reports that he's recently been taking "calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

The Pritzkers, one of the nation's wealthiest families and heirs to the fortune created by the Hyatt hotels, agreed today to pay a record $460 million to the federal government to avoid being punished for the failure of Superior Bank F.S.B., the big savings and loan institution that regulators seized last summer.

This is not an easy one for the Illinois senator because of the companies' close ties to his party. To be sure, both Republican and Democratic politicos have held well-paid positions in the two firms or have partaken of the tens of millions that they spend on lobbying. But a few Republicans, such as Mr. McCain and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), who has been chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, have taken them on over the years, warning about their use of an implicit government guarantee to pursue private profits. Meanwhile, Democrats were not only politically...

... That’s because Raines was transforming Fannie Mae from a boring but stable financial institution dedicated to making homes more affordable into a risky venture that abused its special status as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE) for Raines’ personal profit. Fannie bought the bad loans and bundled them together with good ones. Wall Street was glad to buy up these mortgage securities because Fannie Mae was deemed a government-insured behemoth “too big to fail.” And others followed Fannie’s lead. The current financial crisis stems in large part from the fact that people who shouldn’t have been buying a home, or...

Even though the Obama campaign says it is. This one tries to saddle Obama with Franklin Raines, the disgraced former head of Fannie Mae, who, according to the McCain ad, has been giving Obama "advice on mortgage and housing policy" The Obama campaign has now sent out this statement from Raines:"I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." And Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton goes on to say: "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines...

In the four years since he stepped down as Fannie Mae's chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal, Franklin D. Raines has been quietly constructing a new life for himself. He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case's D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.

Fannie Mae, the home mortgage company, was sued yesterday for securities fraud by the attorney general of Ohio, who accused the company of manipulating its earnings to inflate artificially the price of its common stock. The suit was filed on behalf of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio and the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, according to the attorney general, Jim Petro. Mr. Petro was seeking class-action status for the suit, which would enable him to proceed on behalf of investors who held Fannie Mae shares during the period of the suspected fraud....

For years, mortgage giant Fannie Mae has produced smoothly growing earnings. And for years, observers have wondered how Fannie could manage its inherently risky portfolio without a whiff of volatility. Now, thanks to Fannie's regulator, we know the answer. The company was cooking the books. Big time.We've looked closely at the 211-page report issued by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo), and the details are more troubling than even the recent headlines. ... (snip) And Fannie was suddenly facing an estimated expense of $400 million. Well, in its wisdom, Fannie decided to recognize only $200 million, deferring the...

Franklin Raines From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton. He is currently employed by Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign as an economic adviser. The son of a Seattle janitor [1], Raines graduated from Harvard University, Harvard Law School; and Magdalen College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Raines was of age during the Vietnam War, but performed no military service. He served in the Carter Administration as...

Unfortunately, the ad does not describe Obama's donations from Frannie and Freddie.

The federal government recently announced that it will come to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two embattled mortgage buyers that for years have pursued a lobbying strategy to get lawmakers on their side. Both companies have poured money into lobbying and campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties and committees as a general tactic, but they've also directed those contributions strategically. In the 2006 election cycle, Fannie Mae was giving 53 percent of its total $1.3 million in contributions to Republicans, who controlled Congress at that time. This cycle, with Democrats in control, they've reversed course, giving the...

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal's editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels. ....... I've thought about that episode more than once recently amid the meltdown and government rescue of Fannie and its sibling,...

WASHINGTON - Fannie Mae's former chief executive says the Bush administration helped orchestrate an accounting scandal that cost him his job, and he wants to use White House documents to defend himself in a shareholder lawsuit.

Howell Raines might have viewed his meteoric fall from journalistic grace as a dead end, but he instead saw a new opportunity. The former New York Times executive editor, who resigned after the Jayson Blair scandal, talked about his new memoir at the Aspen Institute on Thursday. "The One That Got Away: A Memoir" is a tale of fishing, but an allegory for life. Raines strayed from the book to lament the direction journalism is headed in - a path he feels is too strongly dictated by consumerism. He also discussed what it means to be a writer and journalist,...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Employees at mortgage giant Fannie Mae manipulated accounting so that executives could collect millions in bonuses as senior management deceived investors and stonewalled regulators at a company whose prestigious image was phony, a federal agency charged Tuesday. The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the product of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal. Earlier, a person familiar with the situation said that Fannie Mae was being fined between $300 million and $500 million for the alleged manipulation of accounting to...