Bush got the blame, but democrats did the dirt

Bush got the blame, but democrats did the dirt

Very interesting pieces of information about the Economic Disaster of 2008. Bush got the blame, but democrats did the dirt.

All paths lead back to actions in the Clinton Administration.

Barney Frank of Massachusetts has had too much involvement in economic policy and has been wrong too many times.

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Lawrence Summers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist and as of 2010 Director of the White House National Economic Council for President Barack Obama.[2] Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics and was Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001, during the Clinton Administration.

Summers' role in the deregulation of derivatives contracts

On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (Over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace." [18] On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." Summers, like Greenspan and Rubin who also opposed the concept release, offered no proof that the contracts would not be misused by financial institutions. Instead, Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need." [19] This argument suggests that the default position in the disagreement was that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin were right, and that anyone (i.e., Brooksley Born) who disagreed with them bore the burden of proving their position. In fact, subsequent events have proven that Summers, Rubin, and Greenspan misjudged the dangers posed by derivatives contracts.

The lack of regulation that allowed A.I.G. to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities was a direct result of efforts by the Treasury (first under Rubin and then under Summers), the Federal Reserve (under Greenspan), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (under Arthur Levitt) to deregulate the derivatives markets. The first response to the CFTC Concept Release was issued as a joint statement from Rubin, Greenspan, and Levitt who stated that they "have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences." [20] Levitt and Greenspan have admitted that their views on this issue were mistaken. Levitt told WGBH in Boston that "I could have done much better. I could have made a difference." Greenspan told a congressional hearing that "I found a flaw ... in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." [21] [22] When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous."

At the 2005 Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan presented a paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" Rajan pointed to a number of potential problems with the financial developments of the past thirty years. [23] The problems that Rajan considers include skewed incentives of managers, herding behavior among traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund operators who suffer withdrawals if they under-perform the market. Rajan also discusses (on pp. 337–40) the problems associated with firms that "goose up returns" by taking risky positions that yield a "positive carry." This is how the infamous Joseph J. Cassano impressed his superiors at A.I.G. for a decade while sowing the destruction of the firm. [24] During the boom years of the housing market, the credit default swap contracts that A.I.G. Financial Products sold provided a stream of premium payments to the company with no expense stream. That's an example of what Rajan calls "goosing up returns" with latent risk. Rajan asks (on page 388) "If firms today implicitly are selling various kinds of default insurance to goose up returns, what happens if catastrophe strikes?" This is a fair question.

The flip side of the trade is equally problematic. Gregory Zuckerman in his book The Greatest Trade Ever about John Paulson's hedge fund recounts the difficulties that Paulson and others had holding on to their bets against the housing market. Even Paulson, whose timing couldn't have been better, spent a great deal of his time persuading investors to persist with the bet against the market. But month after month, millions of dollars were paid out on the credit default swap premia. The investors saw money spent and gone that could have been used to buy assets with rising prices, or at least held safely with a positive yield. As Rajan puts it (p. 338), "it takes a very brave investment manager with infinitely patient investors to fight the trend, even if the trend is a deviation from fundamental value."

Justin Lahart, writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2009 about the response to Rajan's paper at the conference recounts that "former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, famous among economists for his blistering attacks, told the audience he found 'the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan's] paper to be largely misguided.'"[25]

In a recent paper (on pages 285-87), Steven Gjerstad and Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith describe more fully (1) the contribution of derivatives to the flow of mortgage funds that supported the housing bubble, (2) the concerns that Brooksley Born had raised about the dangers inherent in these contracts, (3) Summers' contribution to their deregulation, and (4) how these contracts precipitated the collapse of the financial system in 2007 and 2008. [26]

On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's "This Week" program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.[27]

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Fannie Mae

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie+mae

History

The Federal National Mortgage Association, colloquially known as Fannie Mae, was established in 1938 after the Great Depression to create a liquid secondary mortgage market and thereby free the loan originators to originate more loans, primarily by buying Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages.[5] In 1968 Fannie Mae was converted into a private shareholder-owned corporation in order to remove its activity from the annual balance sheet of the federal budget.[6] Fannie Mae was split into the current Fannie Mae and the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA), colloquially known as Ginnie Mae, to support the FHA-insured mortgages as well as Veterans Administration (VA) and Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) insured mortgages, with the full faith and credit of the United States government.[7] In 1970, the federal government authorized Fannie Mae to purchase private mortgages, i.e. those not insured by the FHA, VA, or FmHA, and created the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), colloquially known as Freddie Mac, to compete with Fannie Mae and thus facilitate a more robust and efficient secondary mortgage market. [7]

In 1977, the Carter Administration and the United States Congress passed and signed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, or CRA. The CRA provided that federally insured banks, as a quid pro quo for being covered in the FDIC agreed to "help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations." Essentially what the CRA was intended to do was to end the practice of redlining, where banks were willing to take deposits in certain areas but refuse lending in those same communities. That is to require banks to provide the same services to all who are equally situated and equally qualified in the communities in which they operate. Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA"), 12 U.S.C. § 2901.

The Act requires that all loans be made with "safe and sound lending practices" and does not require a lowering of underwriting standards in making community based loans. The regulators for the CRA are the four federal bank-regulating agencies, FDIC, Federal Reserve Bank, Office of the Comptroller of Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision. The Act required participating banks to keep records and subjects them to periodic CRA examinations. That examination results in a performance rating for the bank or thrift, which must then be disclosed to the public. The enforcement mechanism is extremely light for a federal statute. Basically, if an institution fails to maintain a satisfactory rating, that rating comes into consideration when regulating authorities review applications for new deposit facilities or mergers. The act does not provide for administrative penalties, such as fines and cease and desist orders, or grant authority for the U.S. Department of Justice to sue under the Act. Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA"), 12 U.S.C. § 2901.

In 1981 Fannie Mae issue its first mortgage passthrough and called it a mortgage-backed security.[8] Ginnie Mae had guaranteed the first mortgage passthrough security of an approved lender in 1968[9] and in 1971 Freddie Mac issued its first mortgage passthrough, called a participation certificate, composed primarily of private mortgages.[9]

In 1999, Fannie Mae came under pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers by increasing the ratios of their loan portfolios in distressed inner city areas designated in the CRA of 1977.[10] Because of the increased ratio requirements, institutions in the primary mortgage market pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements on the mortgages it was willing to purchase, enabling them to make loans to subprime borrowers at interest rates higher than conventional loans. Shareholders also pressured Fannie Mae to maintain its record profits.[10]

In 2000, because of a re-assessment of the housing market by HUD, anti-predatory lending rules were put into place that disallowed risky, high-cost loans from being credited toward affordable housing goals. In 2004, these rules were dropped and high-risk loans were again counted toward affordable housing goals.[11]

The intent was that Fannie Mae's enforcement of the underwriting standards they maintained for standard conforming mortgages would also provide safe and stable means of lending to buyers who did not have prime credit. As Daniel Mudd, then President and CEO of Fannie Mae, testified in 2007, instead the agency's underwriting requirements drove business into the arms of the private mortgage industry who marketed aggressive products without regard to future consequences: "We also set conservative underwriting standards for loans we finance to ensure the homebuyers can afford their loans over the long term. We sought to bring the standards we apply to the prime space to the subprime market with our industry partners primarily to expand our services to underserved families.

"Unfortunately, Fannie Mae-quality, safe loans in the subprime market did not become the standard, and the lending market moved away from us. Borrowers were offered a range of loans that layered teaser rates, interest-only, negative amortization and payment options and low-documentation requirements on top of floating-rate loans. In early 2005 we began sounding our concerns about this "layered-risk" lending. For example, Tom Lund, the head of our single-family mortgage business, publicly stated, "One of the things we don't feel good about right now as we look into this marketplace is more homebuyers being put into programs that have more risk. Those products are for more sophisticated buyers. Does it make sense for borrowers to take on risk they may not be aware of? Are we setting them up for failure? As a result, we gave up significant market share to our competitors. "[12]

In 1999, The New York Times reported that with the corporation's move towards the subprime market "Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s."[13] Alex Berenson of The New York Times reported in 2003 that Fannie Mae's risk is much larger than is commonly held.[14] Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan: "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events 'unlikely'".[15]

On September 10, 2003, the Bush Administration recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis. Under the plan, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae. The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set capital-reserve requirements for the company and to determine whether the company is adequately managing the risks of its portfolios. The New York Times reported that the plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is broken. The Times also reported Democratic opposition to Bush's plan: "These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." [16] Congress, controlled by Republicans during this period, did not introduce any legislation aimed at bringing this proposal into law until the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which did not proceed out of committee to the Senate. [17]

On January 26, 2005, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (S.190) was first introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chuck Hagel.[18] The Senate legislation was an effort to reform the existing GSE regulatory structure in light of the recent accounting problems and questionable management actions leading to considerable income restatements by the GSE's. After being reported favorably by the Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in July 2005, the bill was never considered by the full Senate for a vote.[19] Sen. John McCain's decision to become a cosponsor of S.190 almost a year later in 2006 was the last action taken regarding Sen. Hagel's bill in spite of developments since clearing the Senate Committee. Sen. McCain pointed out that Fannie Mae's regulator reported that profits were "illusions deliberately and systematically created by the company's senior management" in his floor statement giving support to S.190.[20][21]

At the same time, the House also introduced similar legislation, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461), in the Spring of 2005. The House Financial Services Committee had crafted changes and produced a Committee Report by July 2005 to the legislation. It was passed by the House in October in spite of President Bush's statement of policy opposed to the House version.[22] The legislation met with opposition from both Democrats and Republicans at that point and the Senate never took up the House passed version for consideration after that.[23]