Posted on 02/11/2010 4:14:37 AM PST by Libloather
Frank lauds Dodd fight for US financial watchdog
2010-02-09 19:24
WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. lawmaker on Tuesday said he supports Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's fight for the Obama administration's proposed independent financial consumer watchdog agency. "I welcome Senator Dodd's intention to fight to preserve an independent consumer agency," said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, adding that past consumer protection failures helped cause the financial crisis.
"Those who cite safety and soundness as a major reason to oppose increased consumer protection have it exactly backwards. In fact, the inability to protect consumers from abuse was a major cause of the financial crisis from which we are just emerging," Frank said in a statement.
His comments came as Elizabeth Warren, head of a panel overseeing the $700-billion U.S. bank bailout program, published an article in The Wall Street Journal backing the agency, which is opposed by bank lobbyists and Republicans.
After months of negotiation toward a bipartisan agreement on financial regulation reform, talks between Dodd and Senator Richard Shelby, his Republican counterpart on the Senate Banking Committee, broke down last week over the proposal.
"Professor Warren's statement today is a beginning to the national debate that we should have on this issue in the coming weeks," Frank said. Warren is a Harvard University Law School professor.
(Excerpt) Read more at iii.co.uk ...
Democratic Daisy Chain!
The visual of Dodd relying on Frank to protect his backside...
Cong Frank lauds Dodd's fight for US financial watchdog: Chairman of the Financial Services Committee Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass), attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Frank emerged from a two-hour banking meeting, and made it clear that governments were now calling the shots after spending billions to bail out the industry.
SEN DODD'S CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS FROM FINANCE INDUSTRIES that Bwaney is sucking up to:
Citigroup, $310,294;
SAC Capital Partners, $282,000;
United Technologies, $263,400;
AIG, $224,678;
Bear Stearns, $205,600;
St. Paul Travelers, $205,400;
Royal Bank of Scotland, $203,750;
Goldman Sachs, $175,600;
Morgan Stanley, $155,000;
Credit Suisse, $154,550;
Merrill Lynch, $134,950;
The Hartford, $94,350;
Bank of America, $91,300;
JPMorgan Chase, $129,150;
USB, $101,900;
Hartford Finance Services, $101,500
Lehman Brothers, $128,400;
KPMG, $113,100;
General Electric, $108,250;
Deloitte Touche, $108,000
==============================================
WHRER DOES HE GO FROM HERE? Now that the Kennedys have been shown the back of the voters' hand by Scott Brown, the only question is---who in MA is next? Interesting that at Scott's victory speech, the crowd chanted, "Kerry's next."
But this is even more relevant: Bwaney Frank’s 4th congressional district went overwhelmingly for Scott Brown; just five of the 24 cities and towns voted for Coakley. Frank acknowledges that it may be a tougher race than he’s used to. “But, if I want to get re-elected it’s my job to talk about the issues and my record, and that’s the nature of democracy,” he said.........fierce competition or not, Frank said he will “definitely” seek re-election this November.
NOT HIS DECISION TO MAKE What this self-absorbed Lipless Wonder fails to fathom is that his constituients (including those townhallers he sneered at) will decide whether he is fit to run for reelection. Now Frank wants to talk about his "record?" Fine. Here it is.
Let The Inquisition Start With Barney Frank
Investor's Business Daily | 3/6/09
FR Posted on 03/08/2009 by FreeManN
Congressman Barney Frank says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. And we couldn't agree more. First up in the court dock: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
Even by the extraordinarily loose standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he'll seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crunch and for what he called "a strongly empowered systemic risk regulator." Frank: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's point man in Washington.
For Frank, perhaps more than any single individual in private or public life, is responsible for both the housing market mess and subsequent bank disaster. And no, this isn't partisan hyperbole or historical exaggeration. But first, a little trip down memory lane. (Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorial.com ...
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THE WORM TURNS The Poor Should Rent, Not Own (Barney Frank admits disastrous mistake)
The Atlantic | 02/01/10 | Daniel Indiviglio /
FR Posted 02/02/2010 by TigerLikesRooster
In its final installment of the "What Went Wrong" Series on the financial crisis, Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) spoke up. Much of it was predictable: Frank ralked like anyone closely following the financial regulation push in Congress already knew. But there was one fascinating gem in his discussing where Fannie and Freddie went wrong. Frank says urging the poor to own homes was mistake, and now believes they should rent instead.
Frank's take on how Fannie and Freddie could be structured to avoid moral hazard and a too cozy relationship with regulators: After stating that we should separate the liquidity creation function from the subsidy objective ( which we already knew he supported), he said: "I think you separate out the function of providing the equity in general for the mortgage market and doing some subsidy and, in my judgment, the subsidy again, as I said before, should be focused on affordable rental housing, not in pushing low income people into owning homes that they can't afford." (Excerpt) Read more at business.theatlantic.com ...
A senior U.S. lawmaker on Tuesday said he supports Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's fight for the Obama administration's proposed independent financial consumer watchdog agency. "I welcome Senator Dodd's intention to fight to preserve an independent consumer agency," said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank
Frank and Dodd 'fighting for consumer protection', is like Willy Sutton giving Banks advice on Security Systems.
For the Youngsters: Willy Sutton
Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefited from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.
Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives.
Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie. Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest.
Critics, however, remain skeptical. ‘It’s absolutely a conflict,’ said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane? “If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have - or at least what’s not in the stock market - that this would be considered germane,’ added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. ‘But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard.’
A top GOP House aide agreed. ‘C’mon, he writes housing and banking laws and his boyfriend is a top exec at a firm that stands to gain from those laws?’ the aide told FOX News. ‘No media ever takes note? Imagine what would happen if Frank’s political affiliation was R instead of D? Imagine what the media would say if [GOP former] Chairman [Mike] Oxley’s wife or [GOP presidential nominee John] McCain’s wife was a top exec at Fannie for a decade while they wrote the nation’s housing and banking laws.’
Frank’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress. ‘I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus,” Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. “On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.’
The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses ‘helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs.’ Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector.
Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.
Three years later, President Clinton’s HUD tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank.
Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis. ‘I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,’ Clinton said recently.”
Hmmmm...so basically...after failing to be granted power to tax an individual’s breathing,(failed to shovel global warming down our throats)having, so far, failed to obtain the power to tax our existence ( a mandatory monthly “health” insurance premium-to be collected by the IRS) and cut off medical care when its cost exceeds the tax utility of the individual to the state, instead they have now grabbed the power from the banks to grant credit.,...the lifeline of all small business...and indirectly, most employees in the world.
This is pure, raw evil.
Does he realize his role in driving the housing bubble? And that (around here -- Boston -- anyway) it also drove rents sky high?
There's an Earl Sholley running against Frank. He ran last time too -- and IIRC was a credible enough challeng for Frank to actually have to campaign. I heard Sholley on a local radio show, and he sounded good!
Scott Brown carried Frank's district -- narrowly, true, and outside the Newton-Brookline area. I really think if Sholley can raise the money and run an informative (real info on what should be the Barney Frank scandal) campaign, he has a shot!
FOR CITY PROBLEMS, FUTURE SOLUTIONS
Boston Globe - Sunday, March 1, 1998
For three centuries, the nation's cities have been the great kettles where immigrant and rural groups arrive, plunge in, and melt successfully into the economic mainstream. But in recent decades, many residents have left the cities for the suburbs. So many, in fact, that political power has increasingly moved with them. Those left behind tend to be poorer, their problems more intractable. The future of cities, and what might brighten it, was the subject of a panel discussion on Feb. 11, sponsored by the University of Massachusetts in Boston, at the Federal Reserve Bank.
The panelists examining “The Future of Our Cities: What Should Be Done to Improve Them, by Whom, and How?” included Andrew Cuomo, US secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Marian Heard, president of United Way of Massachusetts; and Mitt Romney, managing director of Bain Capital Inc. Democratic US Representative Barney Frank gave closing remarks, and the moderator was Paul Guzzi, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Following are excerpts from the discussion:
(snip)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about the continuing loss of affordable housing?
CUOMO: We support any community actions to prevent the loss of affordable housing. The loss of affordable housing is a problem nationwide. It's much, much worse than most people realize. . . . Listen to this: Every year since we've started keeping numbers, this nation produced more affordable housing than it lost. Meaning what? Meaning you lose affordable housing units every year. They get old, they come out of service, they get transformed into something else. But you always produced morethan you lost, so there was always a net positive every year . . . until 1996. In 1996, the United States Congress was more interested in eliminating the Department of Housing and Urban Development than building affordable housing. In 1996, for the firs
At the same point in time where the construction went net-negative, the need was at its highest point in history: 5.3 million families are on what's called the worst-case housing needs, defined as people who earn less than 50 percent of median income, less than 50 percent of median income, which means that they're very poor and they pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent. . . . We want to get the [Federal Housing Administration] back into business, let people who are struggling own their own home. Ownership equity works for a community, works for the individual.
(snip)
BARNEY FRANK: There is a division in this country as to whether or not the resources ought to be made available to deal with the problems we've been talking about, because the resources are going to have to come through the government. And as long as we have this ideology that says government is bad, and that any time you reduce government spending that's a good thing, you are not going to make a serious dent in these kinds of problems. . . . One of the complicated factors in our national politics is that, to many in the majority community, one of the obstacles to our winning and getting more resources for low-income people is that it is seen as something of a racial issue. People see the recipients of these resources through government programs as disproportionately African-American, and that's one of the problems we have. . . .
Let me be explicit. . . . The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation picked up all the housing because banks went under, and were stuck with the housing. It was going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and, because the federal government was in a hurry to get rid of it, a lot of people were getting some great bargains.
We thought that we should intervene, Congress did, and give lower-income people a share of those bargains, so we said: Housing that was worth less than so much a unit, whether it was an individual house or a unit in an apartment house, we would not take top bid for that, but we would set a minimum price and we would give preference to lower-income people who wanted it for home ownership or for people who would buy it and make it affordable housing. That was an enormously successful program.
(snip)
(no links)
FANNIE MAE MORTGAGE RULES WILL HURT BUYERS OF MANUFACTURED HOMES
Grand Forks Herald (ND) - Friday, September 12, 2003
Author: Genaro C. Armas, Associated Press
EXCERPT
Rep. Barney Frank , D-Mass., has sent numerous letters to Fannie Mae chief executive officer Franklin Raines asking him to withdraw the down payment guidelines, which went into effect Aug. 24.
According to Fannie Mae’s Deborah Tretler, the changes were prompted by a spike in delinquencies and foreclosures on manufactured home loans. That came after many home sellers and lenders in the late 1990s extended loans to buyers with poor credit histories or not enough income to pay their mortgages, industry experts say.
“We don’t serve borrowers well when it is easy for a borrower to get into a home under very flexible terms, only to have them lose their home , their credit ruined and their home ownership dreams turned into a nightmare,” said Tretler, vice president of single-family homes.
//
Frank seeks to broaden - mortgage program - Limit on loans - excludes many
Boston Globe, The (MA) - Monday, December 4, 2006
Author: Susan Milligan ; Globe staff
WASHINGTON - Democrats plan to use their new majority status in Congress to expand the mortgage market for tens of thousands of home buyers in Massachusetts and other states where high housing prices are limiting use of federally regulated mortgage programs, according to Capitol Hill lawmakers.
Representative Barney Frank , a Newton Democrat set to become the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in January, said he will aggressively push legislation to ease current restrictions on the amount of a mortgage that can be held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two private mortgage companies chartered by the federal government.
Current law sets a limit - currently at $417,000 - on the maximum amount of a housing loan held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But because home prices in Massachusetts are comparatively high, relatively few buyers can benefit from the programs, housing advocates said.
Frank said he will use his power as chairman to seek a change in the law to correlate the mortgage cap to the price of housing in an area, instead of a flat limit that now applies to all areas of the country.
The current rules “keep them from doing luxury housing in Nebraska,” but severely limit opportunities for what would be considered middle-income homebuyers in Massachusetts, Frank said.
(snip)
“This is pure, raw evil.”
Uh, yeah ;-)
Frank will never be brought to justice. He pulled a Willie Sutton in broad daylight.
Looks like every investment bank/bank/financial services company threw money at Bawney ;-)
Herb Moses,
Who is Herb Moses?
Frank's role in driving the housing bubble (around Boston anyway) also drove rents sky high. Earl Sholley is running against Frank---ran last time too--if Sholley can raise the money and run an informative campaign w/ real info on the Barney Frank scandals, he has a shot!
Frank's now tarnished--and as long as he can't raise the money, he's finished. He needs to be outed time and time again by the good people of MA.
I hear Scott Brown's team is going after RI's Patrick Kennedy. Should be time left to nail Frank (/snix).
YES! Bwaney has two challengers at this point: Earl Sholley, who’s been the sacrifical lamb running against Bwaney and a fresh face, Keith Messina.
LOL
Previous FR thread with lots of info on Barney’s friend:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2145435/posts
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