You either have a very bad memory or an agenda.
President Bush tried several times to reign in Fannie and Freddie and was rebuffed by the Dems on Congress and and scolded by them. You've forgotten the whole Harold Raines mess, have you ?
They each took away on the high side of $20 million, so naturally there could not be allowed to have any underlings punished and fined while the top Democrats thrived.
Besides, Raines is a black executive who leaves a trail of investigations behind him, and Gorelick was Janet Reno's fixer (the Gorelick Wall between the CIA, FBI, and NSA) who Bill Clinton later put on the 9/11 Commission to protect him.
-PJ
“HORSEFEATHERS! You either have a very bad memory or an agenda.”
I have a very good memory. I was one of the very few here at FR who was warning about a real estate bubble years before it blew up. Ex-Texan was another. My “agenda” is to deal in facts and slap down the sort of nonsense that you are posting.
“President Bush tried several times to reign in Fannie and Freddie and was rebuffed by the Dems on Congress and and scolded by them. You’ve forgotten the whole Harold Raines mess, have you ? “
Of course I haven’t forgotten. The difference is that I know what the Raines mess was about and you don’t. In fact I recall Raines well enough to know that his name isn’t Harold.
Raines and his cohorts were manipulating Fannie’s income statement in order to boost their bonuses. That is why the Securities Exchange Commission was investigating them after Fannie’s OFHEO regulatory body notified the SEC of accounting irregularities, a fact you would have been aware of if you actually knew what the SEC case was about.
You are similarly benighted over Bush’s motive for attempting to reign in Fannie and evidently believe it was somehow linked to the SEC action. It wasn’t. It had nothing to do with Raines cooking the books in order to increase his bonus, which was the SEC’s concern. It had nothing to do with subprime lending, a policy of which Dubya was a major cheerleader (see his American Dream Downpayment Initiative speech which includes his fulsome praise for Franklin Raines).
It had everything to do with Fannie’s capital ratio, as I mentioned in my previous post. I’m quite certain that you haven’t the faintest idea of what a capital ratio is and why it was of concern to Bush, but you could begin your education with this article from Cato:
http://www.cato.org/publications/speeches/role-fannie-freddie-driving-financial-system-leverage