Free Republic

This is the video of an interview after the close on CNBC by Kelly Evans of Dick Bove and Josh Rosner on the NYT story by Gretchen Morgenson that showed the Obama Administration changed the agreement between the US Government and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by fiat ruling. Play the video at the link. If you think this isn't worth it, just note that the video has been buried off their front page . . . since it slaps the Obama people right in the face and heaven forbid that happens on an NBC property.

Companies, if granted the leeway, will surely present their financial results in the best possible light. And of course they will try to persuade investors that the calculations they prefer, in which certain costs are excluded, best represent the reality in their operations. Call it accentuating the positive, accounting-style. What’s surprising, though, is how willing regulators have been to allow the proliferation of phony-baloney financial reports and how keenly investors have embraced them. As a result, major public companies reporting results that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, has grown from a modest problem into a...

It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares? Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them. Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a...

full title...LETTER: Ralph Nader questions Obama administration’s ‘legal authority’ to shut out Fannie and Freddie shareholders from future profits....Political activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader is questioning the “legal authority” of the Obama administration’s secret decision to prevent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders from obtaining any future earnings in the government sponsored enterprises (GSE). Nader slammed the administration’s actions in a letter he sent to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which was obtained by The Daily Caller. The administration’s decision to shut out shareholders means that the mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which received a $189.5...

A new and extensive analysis of 2.4 million loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration in recent years shows a pattern of risky lending that could generate $20 billion in losses and harm thousands of the nation’s most vulnerable borrowers. By ignoring risks in loans it insured in 2009 and 2010, the study concludes, the F.H.A. is imperiling both borrowers and taxpayers who stand behind the agency. The analysis emerged less than a month after the F.H.A.’s auditor submitted a troubling report on the financial soundness of its insurance fund. In mid-November, the auditor estimated that the fund, which backs...

Anyone wanting to understand the beginnings of great economic collapse of 2008 should start with the book "Reckles$ Endangerment", by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Mortgenson is finally interviewed by Brian Lamb on this week's C-Span Q&A, and gets to tell a bit of the story of how government mismanagement and outright corruption in the early 90's set the stage for the wrecked economy in the late 00's. Lamb, for some reason, tries his best to turn a lot of the blame to Republicans, and Morgenson does the obligatory "both sides of the aisle" routine, but the names you'll hear...

STOP your bellyaching. That was the message delivered last Thursday to Americans who today make almost nothing on the savings in their bank accounts. It came from Sarah Bloom Raskin, an insider at the Federal Reserve. Ms. Raskin, one of the governors on the Fed board, made the usual disclaimer that her comments reflected her own thinking. But Fed watchers said her remarks probably mirrored views inside the central bank. The issue — as anyone looking for income-producing investments knows — is that the Fed drove down interest rates to almost zero to shore up big banks and an economy...

That old line from the Marx Brothers came to mind last week as MF Global, the brokerage firm run by Jon S. Corzine, was felled by over-the-top leverage and bad derivative bets on debt-weakened European countries. Suddenly, all of those claims that American financial institutions have little to no exposure to Europe rang hollow. You can understand why Wall Street wants to play down the threats from Europe. Its profits depend on the market’s confidence in the products it sells — and on the belief that the firms that sell those products will be around tomorrow. But MF Global provides...

Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner have written a devastating critique of the public-private partnership that was aimed at putting Americans, including unqualified Americans, into their own homes. This government-sponsored, corporation-endorsed alliance lay at the root of the financial crisis. Their book is timely as the hallowed notion of public-private partnerships--the goodness of which is beyond question in government, academic, policy and even some corporate circles--represents policy makers' ideal for achieving social and political objectives in contemporaryAmerica. Noman says caveat emptor! The story traverses similar territory to that covered by Peter Schweizer's "Architects of Ruin," and Thomas Sowell's "The Housing Boom...

THE mortgage business is moribund. New loans are down. New foreclosures are up. But why let a little sorry news get in the way of a good party? Last week, almost 3,000 people descended on the Hyatt Regency in Chicago for the 98th annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association... --snip-- Representative Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who heads the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, said he was disturbed by the turnout from Fannie and Freddie. It reflected a troubling “business as usual” approach by the mortgage giants, he said. “They don’t act like companies...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...