“No Man’s life liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session”.

- attributed to NY State Judge Gideon Tucker



Friday, August 20, 2010

Two Pols Rewrite History Re: Fannie & Freddie

The Wall Street Journals of the week I was away contained some fascinating articles regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On August 3, former Fannie CEO Frank Raines wrote a lie-filled letter to the Journal's editors, the facts of which an accompanying staff editorial kindly noted.

In Raines' case, he, according to the Journal staff piece, rewrote history in a manner very flattering to himself and that made Fannie and Freddie out to be saviors of the US mortgage industry.

According to Raines, Wall Street had abandoned the mortgage sector, when, in truth, it was driven out by low-cost, subsidized federal activity which resulted in the meltdown of the entire US financial sector.

On the other hand, we have Barney Frank doing an abrupt about-face this week, now insisting that Fannie and Freddie need to be shuttered.

Quite a change from "roll the dice" Barney of only a few years ago, when he was happily, and publicly, playing roulette with taxpayer money in the residential mortgage arena.

Could Barney be taking seriously the growing voter disgust with his personally having cost them hundreds of billions of dollars of losses?

Yesterday's lead staff Journal editorial claimed to support Frank's newfound beliefs, and I'm sure they do. The question is, how can you trust someone so fickle and shallow?

Barney Frank obviously has no shame, and doesn't care that his video record makes him out to be a liar and an opportunist.

Much like Frank Raines, actually.

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