Free Republic

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.

Companies, if granted the leeway, will surely present their financial results in the best possible light. And of course they will try to persuade investors that the calculations they prefer, in which certain costs are excluded, best represent the reality in their operations. Call it accentuating the positive, accounting-style. What’s surprising, though, is how willing regulators have been to allow the proliferation of phony-baloney financial reports and how keenly investors have embraced them. As a result, major public companies reporting results that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, has grown from a modest problem into a...

full title...LETTER: Ralph Nader questions Obama administration’s ‘legal authority’ to shut out Fannie and Freddie shareholders from future profits....Political activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader is questioning the “legal authority” of the Obama administration’s secret decision to prevent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders from obtaining any future earnings in the government sponsored enterprises (GSE). Nader slammed the administration’s actions in a letter he sent to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which was obtained by The Daily Caller. The administration’s decision to shut out shareholders means that the mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which received a $189.5...

One of the largest companies that provided home foreclosure services to lenders across the nation, DocX, has been indicted on forgery charges by a Missouri grand jury — one of the few criminal actions to follow reports of widespread improprieties against homeowners. A grand jury in Boone County, Mo., handed up an indictment Friday accusing DocX of 136 counts of forgery in the preparation of documents used to evict financially strained borrowers from their homes. Lorraine O. Brown, the company’s founder and former president, was indicted on the same charges. Employees of DocX, a unit of Lender Processing Services of...

THE mortgage business is moribund. New loans are down. New foreclosures are up. But why let a little sorry news get in the way of a good party? Last week, almost 3,000 people descended on the Hyatt Regency in Chicago for the 98th annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association... --snip-- Representative Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who heads the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, said he was disturbed by the turnout from Fannie and Freddie. It reflected a troubling “business as usual” approach by the mortgage giants, he said. “They don’t act like companies...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...

“Reckless Endangerment” a scalding new book ....... is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence.........."a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.” The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards......... In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing homeownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating...

Burning Down The House George F. Will, Friday, July 1 “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” — Emerson The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered. Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more. Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist,...