But by the time Mr. Mudd became Fannie’s chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress [GOP at the time, eh? - dirboy] was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans.
What about the role of Franklin Raines? Why, initially, he seems like a miracle worker, from his initial mention in paragraph 13:
Just two decades earlier, Fannie had been on the brink of bankruptcy. But chief executives like Franklin D. Raines and the chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard built it into a financial juggernaut by aiming at new markets.
You have go DEEP into the article to get the details that show the Dem role here. You have to click on the web version to go to page 2, and I imagine in the print edition, the Dem malfeasance comes after the Page A1 copy. The accounting fraud is mentioned (but not quantified at $10 billion). Barney Frank is mentioned well after the halfway point of the article.
This is CLASSIC NY Times positional reporting.
I believe this article like the ayers article gives the ammo to Gov. Palin to make the bailout issue the issue from here on, the Times have published articles from the 1990s pointing out what just happened and it was the dem leadership that refused to take measures to prevent what just happened from happening.
If the economy is the issue from now on then the rats and culprits have to be pointed out, I wish on her next campaign speech they would play all the You Tube videos of the Dems, from the meeting with the Congresional Black Caucus, to the oversight committees under Franks and Dobbs,
on a giant screen prior to her starting talking.
She can get move this back to the front pages and directly into the American mind, those that have not totally closed it anyways.
The NYT has identified the fall guys Democrats will focus on: Daniel Mudd, who took over in 2004 and is portrayed in this article as a know nothing, incompetent pansy completely out of his league and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, who it is claimed by anonymous sources (of course) that he pressured and threatened Mudd into taking on toxic loans from Countrywide or else Countrywide was not going to do any more business with Fannie M.
As dirtboy wrote, the article does mention Democrats' involvement in exhorting Fannie M. to take on more high risk mortgages, but you have to get to page 3 to read about that and even then, it's portrayed as Democrats just trying to help out the little guy.
My advice to Mudd and Mozilo - INCOMING MISSILES LASER GUIDED TOWARD YOU. Better sign on some good attorneys - maybe F. Lee Levin is available because you're going to be starting right up Waxman's nostrils in a couple of months.
Also the article tries to paint it as Freddy/Fannie being pressured equally to buy risky loans by both the Congress AND Wall Street. The proof? Mean phone calls from Wall Street types and a meeting where Mozilo told Mudd Freddy/Fannie would become irrelevant if it didn’t. Meanwhile the Democrats were “demanding” the same thing. The question is which is more persuasive — words spoken by Wall Street or demands issued by Democrats, the latter being backed up by the power to investigate and harass.