Boston is a very, very small town.
Bwarny Frank represents Brook line, very Jewish, liberal, lefty. He went to Harvard, a few miles away, but grew up in New Jersey. He worked for Boston Mayor Kevin White.
Now a deeper connection. The Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, in the early eighties did a “study’ of mortgage redlining in Boston. Basically poor, single mom, black, low to no income blacks couldn’t get mortgages at all, or at rates compared to married, double income, working whites and Asians. This was seen as a crime. The then president of the Boston Fed was Richard F. Styron.
The years go by and....
Freddie Mac Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Syron pocketed nearly $19.8 million in compensation last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Friday, even though the mortgage company’s stock lost half its value in 2007.
If Syron stays at the helm of Freddie Mac through the end of next year, he will receive nearly $20 million in stock awards if the board says he has met certain goals. This year, he is guaranteed to get $8.8 million in stock grants regardless of performance.
For 2007, Syron received a $1.2 million salary, a $3.45 million bonus, including $1.25 million to remain at the company, and $771,585 in other compensation. He also received stock and options valued by the company at $14.3 million at the time they were awarded.
Official Boston Fed bio. Richard F. Syron President from 1/1/1989 to 3/31/1994 Richard Francis Syron was born in Boston on October 25, 1943. He graduated from Boston College in 1966 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Tufts University in 1971. Syron worked at the Boston Fed at two separate times: (1) From 1974 to 1985, he served as an economist, officer, and economic advisor in the Boston Fed’s research department; and (2) he returned to the Bank in 1989 to serve as President for five years. During the intervening years, he held positions at the U.S. Treasury; served as assistant to Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; and served as President of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. As President of the Boston Fed, Syron was active in public policy debates. He sponsored a landmark study on racial discrimination in mortgage lending and played a key role in the restructuring of New England's banking system following the strains of the 1980s and early 1990s. Syron left the Boston Fed in 1994 to become chairman and chief executive officer of the American Stock Exchange. He led this exchange through its 1999 merger into the National Association of Securities Dealers, the operator of NASDAQ. Syron then became president, chief executive officer, and later chairman of the board of Thermo Electron Corporation, a Waltham, Massachusetts, maker of high-tech instruments. In 2003, he was named to his current position as chairman and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).