Just yesterday afternoon, during Congressional questioning of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, I caught part of Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings' silly rant regarding last year's global financial crisis.
Sounding full of himself, Cummings summarily declared that, for so much financial damage to have occurred, someone must have done something criminal, and Congress would be getting to the bottom of it.
Well, yes, in one sense, Cummings is right. His colleague, Barney Frank, and over in the Senate, Democrats Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad, who took bribes from Countrywide Finance, all greenlighted many practices, if not insisted on them, involving Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the CRA, and various allowances to private mortgage conduits. So, if there is criminal activity to be found, Capitol Hill is an excellent place to start, Rep. Cummings. In fact, your own party's House and Senate Caucuses will do fine.
Beyond that, a logical next step is to ask why so many questionable mortgages were overseen and allowed by Fed and FDIC regulators. It fell to these civil servants to supervise the soundness of banking and lending practices at various housing finance lenders, but they evidently took a break from this activity.
So far, we're not really even at the private sector, and we have a target-rich environment.
Isn't it just what you'd expect from a Congressional member these days? To turn his gun sites on the private sector and threaten unspecified witch hunts and criminal penalties, when his own colleagues led the way in fostering, demanding and facilitating unwise lending practices which figured heavily in the financial crisis of the past few years?
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