Free Republic

There are some preliminary reports about Bill Clinton’s purported $50,000-a-month retainer — paid out to Teneo, a firm where he is chairman of the board — from his friend Jon Corzine’s now broke MF Global. It reminds of Newt Gingrich’s getting $30,000 a month for his work as a “historian” for Freddie Mac up until the eve of its crack-up. One comes away with a sort of despair that our most prominent politicians, who have already done quite well in private and public life, still cannot refrain from cashing in on their contacts for even more cash. The symptoms are...

How the American Free Market imploded, and how it can be repaired It should be counted very curious why the real cause of our recent financial collapse has been not only ignored, but the socialist Democrat Program that inflicted the damage was actually just beefed up this week. This was undoubtedly the political scandal of our nations history. Even though it was openly mocked on SNL, and grassroots efforts on Youtube, one with over 1 million hits, exist, the whole matter has been largely swept under the rug by the Marxist Media. I am referring, of course, to Fannie Mae....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal taxpayers should stop propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Congress will wean the country away from its reliance on the two huge but fiscally feeble housing finance companies, House Republicans said Wednesday. Democrats conceded that changes are needed in Fannie and Freddie, which have swallowed $150 billion in federal aid since the government took them over in September 2008. But they cautioned that care must be taken to avoid jeopardizing the popular 30-year fixed rate mortgage and the access to the housing market that the two companies have helped provide to millions of moderate-income...

Government officials want you to know the cost of the bank bailout is going to be around $90 billion, much less than previously feared. But there is, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "one glaring exception" to this otherwise welcome news: The optimistic tally doesn't include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Technically, that's two glaring exceptions, but let's not split hairs. The troubled mortgage giants currently enjoy an unlimited line of credit from Uncle Sam, and the CBO projects their investment portfolios -- stuffed with subprime and other toxic mortgages -- will suffer combined losses of $370 billion through...

SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRISIS HITS WHOREHOUSESMarch 3, 2010 It looks like Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes is on track to win another endorsement from ACORN! This week, Hynes announced that "no criminality has been found" after his investigation of the videotapes made by investigative journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, which show ACORN employees counseling the pair on getting a mortgage for a house of prostitution. (They got a choice of government loans: Phat Fannie Mae, Prince Freddie Mac or Barney Fresh Daddy Frank ... aka "Sir Fix-A-Lot.") I'm just glad to know that Hynes conducted a thorough "investigation" first. Who...

Just last month the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the agency responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, responded to our FOIA lawsuit by telling us that all of the documents we seek are not "FOIA-able"! Here's the exact language the Obama agency used in its recent court filing: "...Any records created by or held in the custody of the Enterprises reflecting their political campaign contributions or policies, stipulations and requirements concerning campaign contributions necessarily are private corporate documents. They are not 'agency records' subject to disclosure under FOIA."

Much to their dismay, Americans learned last year that they “owned” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Well, meet their cousin, Ginnie Mae or the Government National Mortgage Association, which will soon join them as a trillion-dollar packager of subprime mortgages. Taxpayers own Ginnie too. Only last week, Ginnie announced that it issued a monthly record of $43 billion in mortgage-backed securities in June. Ginnie Mae President Joseph Murin sounded almost giddy as he cheered this “phenomenal growth.” Ginnie Mae’s mortgage exposure is expected to top $1 trillion by the end of next year—or far more than double the dollar amount...

The Obama administration is considering an overhaul of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would strip the mortgage finance giants of hundreds of billions of dollars in troubled loans and create a new structure to support the home-loan market, government officials said....

David Kellerman, Acting CFO of Freddie Mac, found dead in apparent suicide.

Former GOP presidential candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee in an exclusive Newsmax interview says President Obama’s early job performance is “cause for alarm,” and warns his penchant for talking down the economy is “the worst possible direction he could take.” Obama’s dark portrayal of the U.S. economy -- apparently intended to lower the high expectations stoked by his rhetoric during the campaign -- is on the verge of becoming a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” Huckabee adds. The former Arkansas governor’s criticism followed a week that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a six-year low. The S & P 500, the index that...

Former GOP presidential candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee in an exclusive Newsmax interview says President Obama’s early job performance is “cause for alarm,” and warns his penchant for talking down the economy is “the worst possible direction he could take.” Obama’s dark portrayal of the U.S. economy -- apparently intended to lower the high expectations stoked by his rhetoric during the campaign -- is on the verge of becoming a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” Huckabee adds. The former Arkansas governor’s criticism followed a week that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a six-year low. The S & P 500, the index that...

As he prepares to take office, President-elect Barack Obama is relying on a small team of advisers who will lead his transition operation and help choose the members of a new Obama administration. Following is part of a series of profiles of potential members of the administration. The New Team A series of profiles of potential members of the Obama administration. Name: Jamie Gorelick Being considered for: Attorney general Would bring to the job: A wide-ranging Washington résumé that spans corporate, legal and national security affairs. Ms. Gorelick (pronounced Guh-REH-lick) was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in...

Democrat Socialist Jujitsu on American CapitalismBy Rene Guerra The Democrats and the rest of the Left have craftily turned around the blame for something disastrous they caused, via insidiously cunning ways. They, of course, couldn’t have done anything of that without the help of the complicit "mainstream" media, who don't expose the true genesis of the monster that the current financial crisis is. Every American should know the truth. The whole thing started when the Democrats corrupted the original intention of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that Bill Clinton signed rescinding the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The latter kept routine-business banks separate from big investment-banks. Specifically,...

It’s helpful to think of how to address the current financial crisis (and I don’t use that word casually) in terms of the end-state we want to achieve, and the transition plan to get there. The problem we face is often described as mind-bendingly complex, but in its essentials, it is simple. It is well known, in retrospect, that we had a classic speculative bubble in home prices. As is typical in a bubble, its later stages were characterized by reckless investment, excess debt and shady-tending-to-illegal business practices. As cheap credit pushed up the market price of houses, homeowners began...

Downsizing Fan and Fred The Monitor's View If the government-sponsored mortgage giants known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac knew what was good for them, they'd accept proposals to create a more muscular regulator over them and reduce their supersized $1.5 trillion portfolios. Those proposals were laid out in a bill introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Richard Baker (R), chairman of the House financial services subcommittee on capital markets. His measure rightly reflects a growing, post-Enron alarm in Congress over the risks a potential collapse of these two beasts poses to the nation's economy. Yet officials at Freddie Mac have...