Free Republic

...Biden on Friday announced that Cathy Russell, the head of the powerful White House personnel office, would leave to assume the role of executive director of UNICEF.... ...A longtime adviser to the Bidens, Russell served in the White House and State Department during the Obama administration. She was U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues under former President Obama, a role that Biden highlighted in Friday’s announcement....

Why Biden thinks the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.” “Biden Gets China,” headlined the January 2, 2012 report in The Atlantic. As author Steve Clemons explained, “Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administrations next phase China policy.” This marked a shift to a “strategy of engagement with Biden at the top,” that allows the US to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status -- and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese...

US home sales are headed for the biggest slowdown since 2011, according to Fannie Mae. The government-sponsored mortgage finance company forecasted total home sales to slump to just 4.8 million this year, marking the slowest sales environment since 2011. That figure will only improve slightly in 2024, with total home sales expected to hit 4.9 million, Fannie Mae economists said. The slump in sales is partly being influenced by high mortgage rates, with the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage rising to 7.18% over the last week, according to Freddie Mac data. That means prospective home buyers are facing...

A top U.S. regulator is considering taking steps to ease strains on mortgage companies facing a cash crunch as millions of Americans struggling with fallout from the coronavirus suspend their monthly payments, according to people familiar with the matter. The Federal Housing Finance Agency is weighing whether to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage-finance giants, to buy home loans that recently entered forbearance, meaning borrowers have stopped making payments, the people said. That would help nonbank mortgage companies that lend to home buyers and then quickly sell the loans to Fannie and Freddie. The strategy was upended...

The level of government interference and taxpayer exposure in the housing market has always been a huge problem. Higher education and mortgages have been key weapons of social engineering. The creation of massive amounts of debt and the entanglement of the government and taxpayers in mortgages was a major cause of the last economic meltdown. The solution here is at best incomplete, but it's a reasonable next step. Especially when dealing with 2020 Democrats who would love nothing more than to create another trillion dollar catastrophe by bribing their voters like crazy. The Trump administration on Thursday released its first...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) rolled out a plan to offer grants up to $25,000 to low-income black individuals to help with a down payment and closing costs on home purchases.At first glance, to the economically uninformed, this seems like it's a good idea. We want as many people as possible to own homes for many obvious reasons.Why not subsidize low-income buyers with a $25,000 grant? This would mean that it would be easier to buy a house in a low-income area. The more houses that are bought, the higher the demand, and prices will rise, benefitting everyone.But as with all...

The gatekeepers of the American mortgage market are increasingly backing loans to borrowers who have heavy debt loads, highlighting questions about mortgage risk as policy makers debate ways to change the system. Almost 30% of loans that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac packaged into bonds last year went to home buyers whose total debt payments amounted to more than 43% of their incomes, according to an analysis by industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. The share has nearly doubled since 2015. Data on other government mortgage programs also show an increase. The backing of these loans opens up...

Dems Nuked the Filibuster to Confirm Him, Then He Turned to Sexual Harassment Another lingering scandal from Obama’s “scandal-free” administration. February 22, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 16 see comments at FrontPage Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism In the fall of 2013, the Democrats were outraged that Republicans were blocking Obama’s nomination of Rep. Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Watt was African-American and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his minions repeatedly tried to associate the move with...

Former federal housing agency director Mel Watt, who represented Charlotte in the U.S. Congress for more than two decades, misused his position to pursue a relationship with a woman working for him, according to a formal inquiry by the agency’s Inspector General. Watt was head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which currently oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from 2014 through January when his five-year term expired. Simone Grimes, a special adviser at the agency, claimed that the 73-year-old Watt sexually harassed her and did not promote her when she declined his advances. Grimes also filed a pay discrimination...

One of the faux scandals to have emerged in this crazy past week was the revelation that in December, President Trump allegedly asked his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, “Are you on my team?” Opined a trio of reporters from CNN, presumably with a straight face, “The episode is the latest to come to light portraying a President whose inquiries sometimes cross a line that presidents traditionally have tried to avoid when dealing with the Justice Department, for which a measure of independence is key.” Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes was not directly referencing these reporters when he told...

A pair of top Obama-appointed bank regulators still serving in the Trump administration could spark another mortgage meltdown by lowering credit standards and encouraging risky lending practices. Democrat Mel Watt, who is serving a special five-year term as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is pushing the mortgage-lending giants he regulates — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to offer home loans to deadbeat borrowers with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market crash, industry officials warn. Meanwhile, the other Obama holdover — liberal Democrat Richard Cordray, who continues to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through 2018...

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President Obama never was shy about using his phone and pen to achieve what he could not get from Congress on regulatory matters. But documents revealed last week show the Obama administration may have been willing to get around congressional decisions on spending by using a slush fund of sorts funded by the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored home loan giants. Fannie and Freddie are federally chartered enterprises which buy mortgage loans from banks and bundle them into securities that are sold to investors, thus freeing up capital so that banks can make more home...

This is the video of an interview after the close on CNBC by Kelly Evans of Dick Bove and Josh Rosner on the NYT story by Gretchen Morgenson that showed the Obama Administration changed the agreement between the US Government and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by fiat ruling. Play the video at the link. If you think this isn't worth it, just note that the video has been buried off their front page . . . since it slaps the Obama people right in the face and heaven forbid that happens on an NBC property.

Fannie Mae (FNMA/OTC) announced new policies that will help more borrowers with student debt qualify for a home loan. These innovations address challenges and obstacles to homeownership due to a significant increase in student loan debt over the past decade and provide access to credit for qualified borrowers. The new solutions give homeowners the opportunity to pay down student debt with a mortgage refinance, allow borrowers to exclude non-mortgage debt paid by others as part of the loan application process, and make it more likely for borrowers with student debt to qualify for a mortgage loan by allowing lenders to...

Complete Headline: Obamacare Implosion Now? Since Obama Siphoned GSE Dividends To Prop Up, Can Trump Simply Halt 1st Qtr Sweep? Earlier this month, Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Corsi of InfoWars (@jerome_corsi) and a CPA "who worked for two years for a major U.S. accounting firm as an outside auditor for Freddie Mac," confirmed a 2012 scheme hatched by the Obama administration to funnel hundreds of billions in dividends from Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop up the failing Obamacare program - by paying subsidies to insurers to remain in the system. [Snip] The conclusion reached by...

One unresolved issue from the financial crisis is the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two firms that stand behind much of America’s housing market. Fannie and Freddie purchase mortgages, bundle them into securities and sell them on to investors with a guarantee. When America’s housing market collapsed a decade ago, the government had to bail them out. Its treatment of the firms since then has created a titanic legal struggle. Shareholders have cried foul. On February 21st, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling in the government’s favour. At issue is the Obama administration’s decision in 2012...

More than a few of my Washington allies noticed a seemingly unremarkable bit of news in a Monday Washington Post article that they thought I ought to see. The article concerned Jared Kushner’s appointment as adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. The appointment did not trouble my friends. What troubled them was the Post’s casual mention that Kushner’s attorney was none other than Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton. Observed the Post, Gorelick “is confident that the anti-nepotism statute does not cover Trump's appointment of Kushner.” Nepotism was the thrust of the article. The Post made no...

As I was writing my new book on TWA Flight 800 --TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy, now available wherever you buy books -- I wondered how Hillary Clinton’s success would affect the book’s. On the up side, if Hillary were nominated, the book would be more relevant as she was at the quiet center of the action. On the down side, her nomination would increase the odds that a protective major media would continue to ignore the great untold story of our time. The media run the risk of being the only adults who do not know...

When Washington took over the beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis of 2008, it was with the implicit promise that they would be returned to shareholders after being nursed back to health. But now, with the unsealing of documents this week that were produced as part of a lawsuit filed against the government, new evidence is coming to light on how intimately the White House was involved in the Treasury’s decision in August 2012 to keep all the companies’ profits for the government. That move effectively maintained...