Free Republic

Freddie Mac Gets Another $6.1B from Gov't BY STEPHEN BERNARD | AP Business Writer You have entered an invalid email address From (email):* Required NEW YORK (AP) - Battered mortgage giant Freddie Mac received $6.1 billion in new funds from the Treasury Department to help offset its mounting liabilities, according to a regulatory filing submitted Wednesday. The company could also be close to naming a new, permanent CEO, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has been operating Freddie Mac since last fall, requested the funds for Freddie Mac after the mortgage...

Homeowners taking part in the Obama administration's housing rescue program through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will now be eligible even if their loan-to-value ratio is up to 125 percent. That means they can have up to 25 percent negative equity and still get a refinance.The rule changes, part of the government's attempts to restore housing affordability and stem the foreclosure crisis, apply to loans backed up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Previously, homeowners could borrow up to 105 percent of their home's value. The new loan-to-value ratio is set up at 125 percent in a further effort to address...

Today the US Treasury Department announced an update to allow refinancing of mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac up to a first lein position of 125% of the home’s appraisal value. This is a level that was previously set at 105% loan to value.

After drawing the funds, Freddie Mac has now received $51.7 billion from the Treasury Department and still has access to an additional $149.3 billion to help it finance operations.

The blunt truth is that even if we had had President Obama's financial regulatory "reforms" in place four years ago--reforms designed to prevent another financial meltdown--we would still have experienced a horrific economic disaster. In other words, the Administration's prescriptions deal with the symptoms--and those badly--not the underlying causes. The astonishing housing bubble could not have happened without the Federal Reserve's easy-money policy, which got under way in late 2003. If not for the excess liquidity created, there would not have been sufficient fuel to distort the housing market and ultimately the financial system. Yet President Obama has remained mum...

How many uninsured Americans are there really? It’s a number that the mainstream media have repeatedly misrepresented to make the health care “crisis” seem worse than it is.

Earlier this year, their cramped mobile home growing smaller every day, Milford couple Lora Painter and Nick Dumont set about searching for larger, more suitable quarters for them and their three sprouting children. Times being what they are, though, scoring such a property for what they could afford was about as likely as all the nation's teens giving up their cell phones. But then, as April showers began bringing May flowers, what Painter calls "our miracle" happened. It came in the form of a tidy, hillside ranch with three good-sized bedrooms and a potential fourth, a couple of airy walk-in...

President Obama and James Lockhart have decided to (financially) rape Americans. Yes, really: June 19 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s program to help more homeowners refinance may be expanded to include borrowers who owe more than 105 percent of their homes’ values, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director James Lockhart said. The Obama administration is considering allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance loans with current loan-to-value ratios of 125 percent or higher, Lockhart said at a National Association of Real Estate Editors Association conference in Washington yesterday. Let me be absolutely clear so nobody can ever accuse me of...

George W. Bush: After being pummeled by his successor, the 43rd president ends his silence on America's slide into socialism and timidity. He reminds us leadership is not something that comes off a teleprompter. Perhaps tired about being publicly blamed by the current administration for all our current ills, Bush spoke out in Erie, Pa., on Wednesday at the 104th annual gathering of the Manufacturers and Business Association. On the same day President Obama announced expanded policing authorities for the Fed to deal with a "culture of irresponsibility," another move many feel will stifle the risk takers and entrepreneurs needed...

Former Freddie Mac national director of Expanding Markets, Vaughn Irons, is now CEO of APD Solutions, a firm established to provide capital support for socially responsible investing. The capital will be made available from Waterfall Asset Management’s billion dollar portfolio, according to a release on the matter. While APD is a business, it is rooted in activities more closely associated with charities; it’s aims are to “revitalize communities” hardest hit by the economic recession in an effort to “jump start” housing activity. Waterfall is a high-yield asset-backed securities and non-performing residential mortgage loan investment adviser with $1.1bn under management. “The...

The American people are pretty well convinced that the mortgage meltdown was the fault of greedy bankers, stupid borrowers, and the odd Friend of Angelo Mozilo like Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT). That's hardly surprising, since the mainstream media has shown a vivid disinterest in getting to the bottom of it all. That's why we have Thomas Sowell. His latest book, The Housing Boom and Bust, is a workmanlike analysis of the housing crisis. It's short enough, at about 50,000 words, for anyone to get through on a weekend. Needless to say, Dr. Sowell does not find that the meltdown was...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday will open a debate that has stymied them for at least a decade: the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant housing finance agencies nearly felled by the credit crisis. Congress is facing the daunting task of remaking the companies after steep mortgage losses led the Treasury in September to seize control of the two financing agencies. The stakes are high, with President Barack Obama counting on the reach of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to carry out his plans to improve housing affordability for nine million Americans. Decisions made...

Could it be that their story doesn't have the normal villains?

Unbelievable I hope you are sitting down near a phone so you can call those thieves in Washington and give them a piece of your mind after you finish reading this Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that Time called the next black holes who are screwing you again to the tune of $5 TRILLION dollars is also sponsoring (with your bailout money keep that in mind) the Illegal Aliens!

VIENNA, Va. (AP) — Freddie Mac's acting chief financial officer was apparently told to take time off from work days before he committed suicide. David Kellerman of Vienna, Va., was found dead Wednesday in the basement of his home. A person close to the company says the chief human resources officer met with Kellerman earlier this week and encouraged him to take a few days off because he had been working hard. The person requested anonymity because the individual wasn't authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The 41-year-old Kellerman was promoted last September when the government seized the mortgage company...

Both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are reporting that Freddie Mac's Chief Financial Officer, David Kellermann, who was found dead Wednesday in an apparent suicide, was involved in recent months in a heated dispute with Freddie's regulator over how to reflect costs of President Obama's anti-foreclosure program. The Post said Kellermann and other Freddie officials "tussled" with the Federal Housing Finance Agency early last month as the company prepared to file a quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Top executives, including Kellermann, were insistent that Freddie Mac inform shareholders of the cost to the company of...

The pressures were already immense when David B. Kellermann was promoted to the top financial position at the mortgage giant Freddie Mac last September. Then they got even worse. Mr. Kellermann’s boss and other top executives were ousted when the Treasury secretary seized Freddie Mac and its sibling company, Fannie Mae; others left on their own and were not replaced. Soon President Obama told the companies they were responsible for carrying out some of his programs to revive the economy, in addition to keeping the housing market afloat by buying and selling hundreds of thousands of mortgages a month. Mr....

I know several FReepers frequent Karl Denninger's Ticker Forum, and I came across this very interesting thread. It seems that David Kellerman was banned from Ticker Forum, former screen name "Blumunki." There are links on this thread to comments made by the member purported to be Kellerman. He was called a troll and a pump-monkey. Karl claims some of these replies came directly from FRE, and he's offering his IP logs to investigators.

But then how would Freddie know if there were a connection?

Check out the BIO: “He served as senior vice president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer. In this position, his primary responsibility was to support the business with the production of timely, accurate, and well-controlled GAAP, fair value and segment earnings financial statements and external disclosures. Before that, Kellermann served as the senior vice president and business area controller. As business area controller, he led the organization responsible for all accounting and finance for Freddie Mac’s lines of business. Kellermann has been with Freddie Mac for more than 16 years. He began as a financial analyst/auditor in 1992, worked for...

Freddie Mac chief financial officer David Kellerman was found dead in his home today. (April 22, 2009) Freddie Mac chief financial officer David Kellerman — who became a celebrity because his company's risky real estate loans helped to fuel the mortgage crisis — was found dead in his home this morning. Police said he committed suicide. Police didn't disclose the specific cause of death, according to the Associated Press, but they did say they found him in the basement of his $900,000 suburban Virginia home, where he lived with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. Neighbors say he had lost a...

It’s the nature of Washington to search for and usually find a politically charged subtext to any news event. But that instinct is never more ghoulish when the event is the sudden death of an important person by his own hand. David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of the troubled Freddie Mac mortgage company, is the latest example of a particular — and particularly macabre — subset of human tragedy: the Washington suicide. These happen often enough that they follow their own morbid rhythm. The normal human reaction — disbelief, horror, sympathy — is followed almost immediately by the...

It’s the nature of Washington to search for and usually find a politically charged subtext to any news event. But that instinct is never more ghoulish when the event is the sudden death of an important person by his own hand. David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of the troubled Freddie Mac mortgage company, is the latest example of a particular — and particularly macabre — subset of human tragedy: the Washington suicide. These happen often enough that they follow their own morbid rhythm. The normal human reaction — disbelief, horror, sympathy — is followed almost immediately by the...

Law enforcement sources said they found David Kellermann, acting chief financial officer of mortgage company Freddie Mac, hanging in the basement of his Reston, Va., home, dead from an apparent suicide early this morning. Virginia police say they found David Kellermann, acting chief financial officer of mortgage company Freddie Mac, hanging in the basement of his Reston home, dead from an apparent suicide early this morning. (ABC News)The death was "an active investigation" and there were "no signs of foul play," Fairfax County police officer Sabrina Ruck said. Local police said they were called to Kellermann's home at 4:48am. Kellermann,...

Police spokesman Lucy Caldwell told AHN that other people were present at the home at the time of Kellermann's death, in Reston, Va., and that there was a gun and a gunshot wound.

David Keller was found dead in his home Tuesday morning in an apparent suicide. Keller, 41, has served as the acting chief financial officer (CFO) for Freddie Mac since September. Kellerman reportedly hanged himself in the basement of his Reston, Va. home. The Fairfax County Police Department said there are no signs of foul play. Keller took over as CFO when Anthony “Buddy” Piszel resigned in the wake of the government takeover. The news comes on the heals of Freddie Mac CEO David Moffett's resignation last month. The government-controlled Freddie Mac owns or guarantees about...

VIENNA, Virginia (CNN) -- The acting chief financial officer of mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac was found dead Wednesday morning at his home, police said. David Kellermann, acting CFO of Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home on Wednesday, police said. David Kellermann's death "may have been an apparent suicide," said Lucy Caldwell, a spokeswoman for police in Fairfax County, Virginia. She said there were no signs of foul play when officers arrived at the home in Vienna shortly before 5 a.m.

The acting head of Freddie Mac, David Kellermann, has apparently committed suicide, Fairfax County Police tell WTOP. Fairfax County Police spokeswoman Mary Anne Jennings says Kellermann, 41, was found at his Hunter Mill Estates home Wednesday morning. Jennings says police responded to the home after family members called police around 5 a.m. "We were called from inside the house to come investigate an apparent suicide," Jennings says. Because of legal ramifications, Jennings says she can't describe the nature of the suicide. "We're not to give you details of the condition of the body, except to say it was an apparent...

The number of American households threatened with losing their homes grew 24 percent in the first three months of this year and is poised to rise further as major lenders restart foreclosures after a temporary break, according to data released Thursday. The big unknown for the coming months, however, is President Barack Obama's plan to help up to 9 million borrowers avoid foreclosure through refinanced mortgages or modified loans. The Obama administration expects its plans to make a big dent in the foreclosure crisis. But it remains to be seen whether the lending industry will fully embrace it, despite $75...

Barney Frank wants credit for putting out a fire that he helped to start. President Obama has declared an era of responsibility. But to Democrats responsibility means blaming Republicans for everything that goes wrong. Aside from the President himself, perhaps no Democrat is more eager to lay blame at the doorstep of conservatives than Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. I bore witness to Frank's song and dance routine during a talk he recently gave at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A video of the forum can be found here. (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/forum-frank-apr09) It is worth...

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....

Yesterday, we learned from the Chicago Tribune that Freddie Mac documents are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act because they contain or might compromise commercial information–that is, the proprietary insider information of a private company. Today, in the Washington Post, we learn that that private company was pressured to withhold negative information it was obligated to disclose under SEC rules. It seems that following government policy will adversely affect its bottom line, and the firm wanted to tell its remaining shareholders that. Federal officials who took over Freddie Mac stopped short of nationalizing the company, leaving it partly...

Steve Doocy discusses with Dan Gainor.

EXCERPT Rahm Emanuel was director when Freddie Mac board was tipped to a fraudulent bonus scheme. On Rahm Emanuel's watch, the Freddie Mac board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass. The accounting scandal wasn't the only one that brewed during Emanuel's tenure. During his brief time on...

Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator. One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.

Will Obama’s Chief of Staff Return Money From Stock Options He Got While Helping to Drive Freddie Mac Into the Ground?The Chicago Trib reports how Rahm Emanuel scored big at Freddie Mac! The collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were key elements in the financial meltdown of 2008. It’s no secret that Democrats under Bill Clinton had used both organizations as personal piggybanks to reward loyal friends. Note: President Bush put a stop to such gross patronage during his Administration.We all know about the tens of millions in bonuses Fannie Mae paid to Franklin Raines, former Clinton...

SNIPPET: "Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R-Georgia) is a member of the House census subcommittee and chairs a census task force created by Minority Leader John Boehner. Westmoreland says ACORN's involvement in the census is due in large part to the fact that their former attorney has taken up residence in the White House. "You have to realize that President Obama used to represent ACORN," he notes. "In fact, he represented them in an Illinois case that said certain banks in Illinois were not doing enough lending to people who could not afford a mortgage, and therefore [he] is one of the...

Fannie and Freddie are paying out those bonuses anyway – regardless of Barney Frank’s demands and the populist furor over AIG’s bonus payouts. Frank, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, sent a letter Friday to James Lockhart, the federal regulator overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, asking him to rescind retention bonuses of at least $1 million planned for four top executives over the next two years. But in letter obtained by POLITICO, Lockhart tells Frank there’s a “great risk” of key employees walking away if they don’t pay out the promised bonuses. These Fannie and Freddie employee retention...

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae beg not to be included in "Bonus Gate". The root causes of the problem beg that they are now the good guys.

Frank asks Freddie, Fannie to halt bonuses By Silla Brush Posted: 03/20/09 12:21 PM [ET] As Congress races to claw back bonus payments at firms taking government bailout cash, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) on Friday called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cancel payments at the mortgage giants now under government control. Fannie Mae is set to pay retention bonuses, with some top executives at the mortgage giant planning to receive more than $1 million. Freddie Mac has yet to release bonus figures. Frank wrote a letter on Friday to James Lockhart, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency,...

Watch the video when you have a moment.

Memory eventually fails us all, but apparently the decline strikes one party far more than the other. In recent weeks, my friends across the aisle have expended a lot of breath proclaiming that the Democrats caused the present financial crisis by failing to pass legislation to regulate financial services companies in the years 1995 through 2006. There is only small one problem with this story -- throughout this entire period the Republicans were in complete charge of the House and for the most critical years they controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. In the House of Representatives, the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fannie Mae is planning to pay retention bonuses of as much as $611,000 each to several top executives of the government-controlled mortgage finance titan. Sibling company Freddie Mac is planning similar awards.

While everyone assails AIG for using less than 0.1% of the taxpayer-bailout money it received to meet contractual obligations in compensation through retention bonuses, another recipient of government largesse has its own bonus program in operation. According to their annual report, Freddie Mac has a generous retention bonus plan built into its operation for the next year. Eligibility includes all of the senior and executive VPs. It comes in four payouts, and only the last has any connection to company performance. Exhibit 10-4 on page 414-5 lays out the program:Objective To retain as many people as possible for 18 months...

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he hopes to introduce legislation later this year to restructure government-backed mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "The current model is broken," the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview Tuesday. One possibility, he said, is to separate the companies into entities serving two functions: one that would ensure adequate funding for the home-mortgage market as a whole and another that would provide government subsidies for housing low-income people. Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Frank spoke at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed...

Freddie Mac: The Government's Next Black Hole? By STEPHEN GANDEL – Tue Mar 17 AIG is to date the most expensive corporate bailout in American history, requiring $180 billion of government funds. But it may soon have competition. Last week, mortgage giant Freddie Mac said that it had lost $50 billion in 2008 alone. A look at the company's books suggests the government will have to spend at least triple that much to save the financial firm from collapse. If the housing market worsens, the tab could even be larger. "Freddie's portfolio of [mortgage] insurance is more risky than the...

LETTER: Bush raised red flags about Fannie and FreddieMarch 14, 2009 6:00 AM Bush raised red flags about Fannie and Freddie In its editorial, "Protect homeowners: It's job No. 1 for Congress" (March 8), The Standard-Times proclaimed that Rep. Barney Frank has been a victim of unfair criticism and that he was actually among the voices "warning that disaster loomed" at government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having an entirely different recollection of the facts, I did a little digging. Here is what I found. Starting with the 2002 budget request in April 2001, the Bush administration raised...

Exclusive: Has Illegal Immigration’s Effect on Education Become the ‘Third Rail’ of Politics? Vincent Gioia Traditionally, Social Security has been the “third rail” of politics but we now have another third rail – illegal immigration and education. Politicians step all over themselves asking for more and more money to be spent on education; ignoring the fact that money alone does not make for a good public education. Another thing we are not allowed to mention in a discussion about public education quality and costs is the impact of illegal immigration; otherwise we are labeled “racists.” The United States has the...

13 Million Illegal Immigrants Living in the United States March 8, 2009 FAIRUS.org How Many Illegal Immigrants? Illegal Immigrant Problems & Statistics FAIR estimates that in 2007 the illegal immigrant population is above 13 million persons. Government and academic estimates indicate that as of 2006 there were 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies estimated the illegal immigrant population at 10 million as of November 2004. It is difficult to have an exact figure because the illegal nature of their presence prevents any enumeration, but the U.S. Census Bureau estimated 8.7...