The sub-prime villains are those who focused on short-term gains, and cared less about the long-term damage done to real estate markets, banks, lawyers, appraisers, accountants, auditors........... and the American economy.
No one has yet been held responsible and served any serious jail time or been stripped of fraudulently acquired assets. Some specific people surface---- getting the credit they deserve for promoting, then trashing the real estate business, and creating the unsustainable mortgage securitization business model.
Countrywide Mtge head Angelo Mozilo has shown us the true path----w/ his monster-child, MERS---- a nationwide electronic database of mortgages.
The impetus for a nationwide electronic database of mortgages originally came in the early 1990's from the biggest mortgage players - the MBA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae .....
<><><> Fannie/Freddie are the key criminal mechanisms of the criminal enterprise that is the thieving Democrat party and its minions. <><><>
The Government filed suit against F/M head Franklin Raines when the depth of the F/M accounting scandal became clear. READ IT HERE http://housingdoom.com/2006/12/18/fannie-charges/
The Government noted, "The 101 charges reveal how the individuals improperly manipulated earnings to maximize their bonuses, while knowingly neglecting accounting systems and internal controls, misapplying over twenty accounting principles and misleading the regulator and the public. The Notice explains how they submitted six years of misleading and inaccurate accounting statements and inaccurate capital reports that enabled them to grow Fannie Mae in an unsafe and unsound manner."
These charges were made in 2006. The Court ordered Raines to return $50 Million Dollars he received in bonuses based on the mis-stated Fannie Mae profits that Rained created to get bonuses. AFTER he was fired, he walked away with about $90 MILLION in pensions and a catalogue of benefits. Freddie and Fannie---two big quasi-govt mortgage banks that got a federal bailout--- used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.
So which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions? The top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and number two was then-Senator Barack Obama. who had only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab the number two spot ahead of John Kerry, decades in the senate, and Chris Dodd then-chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.
Fannie and Freddie were creations of the Congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people, and as it turned out, some people who couldn’t afford them.
Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions.
The Clinton Administration’s White House budget director Franklin Raines was appointed by Clinton to run Fannie........ and collected $50 million dollars. Jamie Gurilli Gorelick (now BP's attorney), Clinton Justice Apartment Official, worked for Fannie and took home $26 million dollars.
Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job. Now remember, Obama’s ads and stump speeches attacked McCain and Republican policies for the financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks...." - FoxNews, Sept. 2008
McCain spoke forcefully on May 25, 2006, on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005: "Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives.
In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets.
The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems.
This report came weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.
REFERENCE----STATUS CUOMO-GILLIBRAND: Their fingerprints are all over the current depression/recession. ap When NY Gov-elect Cuomo was pointed Housing and Urban Development Secy under Clinton, Cuomo w/ Clinton's approval, was the prime mover behind programs that destabilized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and his programs to mandate banks loan to low-income and bad-credit homebuyers were a significant factor in the housing collapse.
Congresswoman Gillibrand served as Special Counsel to Andrew Cuomo, Pres Clinton's appointee as Secy of HUD. Gillibrand played a key role in furthering HUD’s Labor Initiative and *New Markets initiative (sub-prime mortgages); Gillibrand worked to strengthen the Davis-Bacon Act and drafting new markets legislation for public and private investment in building infrastructure to revitalize lower income areas across the nation."
"Sure, I know how I got the HUD job. Clinton needed my daddy in his corner,
so I got the HUD job. HUD is where I got the $18 million to run for Governor."
CUOMO AND BILL CLINTON CREATED CONDITIONS FOR MELTDOWN (Village Voice 8-5-08) Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the sub-prime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans.
Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.......
SOURCE http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-05/news/how-andrew-cuomo-gave-birth-to-the-crisis-at-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/