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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Don't let facts interfere, but the Dems did not control the Senate for all of 2001 and the Reps did not control it for all of 2002. It was the Reps until1/01- 6/01 (Jeffords left the Rep party), and the Reps took it back 1/03. I'll do Greenwald the way he'd do Palin: if he gets this wrong (see his diagram) he probably knows nothing. And if I misread his diagram he doesn't know how to draw.
should read "it was the reps 1/01-6/01"
with this Michael Gordonesque hit piece on Democrats and how they're apparently largely to blame for the current financial meltdown by having pressure Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac, and banks, to lend to unqualified minorities home buyers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/05fannie.html
Some key excerpts:
Pressured to Take On Risk, Fannie Hit a Tipping PointBy CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: October 4, 2008
...
But by the time Mr. Mudd became Fannie’s chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans.
So Mr. Mudd made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives.
For a time, that decision proved profitable. In the end, it nearly destroyed the company and threatened to drag down the housing market and the economy.
Dozens of interviews, most from people who requested anonymity to avoid legal repercussions, offer an inside account of the critical juncture when Fannie Mae’s new chief executive, under pressure from Wall Street firms, Congress and company shareholders, took additional risks that pushed his company, and, in turn, a large part of the nation’s financial health, to the brink.
Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed more than $230 billion in loans to risky borrowers — more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined, according to company filings and industry data.
“We didn’t really know what we were buying,” said Marc Gott, a former director in Fannie’s loan servicing department. “This system was designed for plain vanilla loans, and we were trying to push chocolate sundaes through the gears.”
(The use of the word "chocolate" strikes me as, oh, rather "interesting".)
Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers.“When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie’s mission is of paramount importance,” Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. “In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more.”
But Fannie’s computer systems could not fully analyze many of the risky loans that customers, investors and lawmakers wanted Mr. Mudd to buy. Many of them — like balloon-rate mortgages or mortgages that did not require paperwork — were so new that dangerous bets could not be identified, according to company executives.
(I call BS on this--the idea that such loans are "new" or can't be risk-valued is rediculous. I once worked for a Wall St. company writing software to assess precisely these sorts or complex cashflows. It's not that difficult if you studied high school algebra and can program.)
Had Fannie been a private entity, its comeuppance might have happened a year ago. But the White House, Wall Street and Capitol Hill were more concerned about the trillions of dollars in other loans that were poisoning financial institutions and banks.Lawmakers, particularly Democrats, leaned on Fannie and Freddie to buy and hold those troubled debts, hoping that removing them from the system would help the economy recover. The companies, eager to regain market share and buy what they thought were undervalued loans, rushed to comply.
The White House also pitched in. James B. Lockhart, the chief regulator of Fannie and Freddie, adjusted the companies’ lending standards so they could purchase as much as $40 billion in new subprime loans. Some in Congress praised the move.
“I’m not worried about Fannie and Freddie’s health, I’m worried that they won’t do enough to help out the economy,” the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at the time. “That’s why I’ve supported them all these years — so that they can help at a time like this.”
Not one mention of a Republican member of congress, or of the fact that Republicans not only controlled congress during most of this period, but did so with an iron fist that allowed the minority Democrats almost no meaningful role. And while it assigns some blame to the administration, it mitigates this by painting Paulson as a latecomer to the crisis who tried his best to prevent the worst from taking place.
Michael Gordon must be giving "research" tips to Mr. Duhigg. Nice work there, Charlie. And a nice complement to their other hit piece linking Obama to Ayers.
Pinch Sulzberger (owner and editor in chief of the NYT) is easily one of the most loathsome people in the media today, having aggresively enabled the worst foreign policy fiasco in US history, tried to help push yet another war with Iran, stood behind a dishonest egomaniacal reporter (who was one of the people who helped sell the Iraq war) as she protected a known traitor, and now trying to help take down Obama. Nice going there, asshole.
Great post, as usual, Glenn..but two things occur to me as a result:
1) what ELSE are these wingnuts supposed to do? If they acknowledge reality, they'd all have to find other lines of work. And that ain't gonna happen. So, they're doing what any unprincipled hack would do. They have no other choice.
2) I'd like to support James Kunstler's new meme here: "the GOP is the Party the Wrecked America." "The GOP: The Party that Wrecked America." Use it often. Use it as often as possible. This is one meme we can inject into the zeitgeist with enough repetition. Even the most low-information voter can comprehend it. The evidence is right in front of them..everywhere.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
