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Barney Frank Wants Government To Enter Municipal Bond Insurance Business Some people never learn. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts is one of them. One might hope that Frank would have learned something from the Fannie Mae and AIG debacles. Sadly that hope is misguided. Barney Frank now wants the government to enter the municipal bond business. Please consider Cities Ask Treasury for $5 Billion to Fund Public Bond Insurer.

AP Ackman: Bond insurers need another downgrade Wednesday June 11, 4:30 pm ET By Joe Bel Bruno, AP Business Writer Activist hedge fund manager Ackman says more downgrades are needed for MBIA, Ambac NEW YORK (AP) -- William Ackman, the billionaire activist hedge fund manager, said Wednesday that the recent downgrades of bond insurers and other financials might not have gone far enough. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, who is open about shorting bond insurers such as MBIA Inc., said rating agencies need to dig deeper into the companies to get a better idea of what is on...

Congress Examines Municipal Bond Ratings, Bond Insurance Industry The fast-spreading U.S. mortgage crisis prompted lawmakers Wednesday to explore problems with municipal bonds, painting a bleak outlook for bond insurers that one official said imposes a "secret Wall Street tax" on state and local taxpayers. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is investigating how credit rating agencies grade the risk of municipal bonds and said the existing system is "quite possibly illegal." He joined other state officials in calling for changes at a House committee hearing. Billions of dollars could be saved by city and state governments if credit raters adopted a...

Today, a struggling bond insurer, ACA Financial Guaranty Corp., will ask its trading partners for more time as it scrambles to unwind more than $60 billion of insurance contracts it sold to financial firms but can't fully pay off, according to people familiar with the matter. The contracts were intended to protect Wall Street firms from losses on mortgage securities and other debt they own. The problem is that the insurer itself is teetering -- with repercussions across the financial world. Some of its trading partners, called counterparties, already are writing off billions of dollars because of its inability to...