Opinion

Dems block reform of corrupt mortgage giants

Hans Bader Senior Attorney, CEI
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In a party-line, 56-to-43 vote Tuesday, Senate Democrats blocked any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the corrupt, government-backed mortgage giants that even administration officials admit were at the “core” of “what went wrong” in the financial crisis.

Obama received $125,000 in contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives as a senator, second only to the corrupt Senator Chris Dodd, who is retiring this year over financial improprieties (such as his real estate gift from a lobbyist and “sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide Financial”), yet is the chief drafter of the financial “reform” legislation expected to pass the Senate by next week.

The financial “reform” bill would devastate the venture capital markets needed to create jobs and small businesses, by imposing onerous restrictions on so-called “angel financing.” It would also give government officials the ability to nationalize businesses that they claim are at risk of failing–and block meaningful judicial review of such seizures by shareholders alleging violations of their constitutional rights. (That will increase the ability of presidents to shake down businesses for donations to their political allies, since a business in danger of being seized by the government will try to curry favor with government officials.) The bill’s House architect, Barney Frank, boasts that it will create “death panels” for American companies (this is the same Barney Frank who for years blocked any reform of Fannie and Freddie).

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae is seeking another $8.4 billion in federal bailout money, after the Obama administration earlier lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants known as the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). Last week, the other GSE, Freddie Mac, asked for $10.6 billion more in bailouts. The Obama administration is certain to approve the new bailout request: “Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie,” reports the New York Times.

Obama’s so-called financial “reform” proposal does nothing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who concedes they were “a core part of what went wrong in our system.” (At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac is now running up $30 billion in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, some of whom have high incomes. Federal regulators sought to make Freddie Mac hide the resulting losses from the SEC and the public.) By contrast, the Republican alternativeaims to wind down, and break up” Freddie Mac and “limit taxpayer exposure” to its losses.

“American taxpayers are paying for $6.8 billion of the Greek bailout” through contributions to an international bailout fund backed by the Obama administration. Greece is being bailed out by Europe and the international community because it is running up huge budget deficits due to a bloated bureaucracy and government pensions that let many Greeks retire in their 50s. “The Obama administration wants to use U.S. tax dollars to bail out a nation that is in a financial death spiral brought on by years of amazingly irresponsible deficit spending and similar behaviors often found in socialist states.”

Rioters in Greece killed three bank employees last week in their rage over possible budget cuts. “The protesting civil servant workers trapped the bank employees in a burning building.”

The Obama administration earlier lifted the $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so that they could continue to buy up junky mortgages at taxpayer expense, and showered their executives with $42 million in compensation.

Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by acting as loan toilets, buying up risky mortgages and thus creating an artificial market for junk. “From the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime.” They paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud — $6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone — to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses. As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.

Banking expert Peter Wallison, who warned for years about the risky practices of Fannie and Freddie, says Obama’s proposals will lead to “bailouts forever.” Obama claims that it will not lead to more bailouts. But as Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) admitted, the “bill has unlimited executive bailout authority. . .The bill contains permanent, unlimited bailout authority.”

Government pressure on banks to make loans in economically-depressed neighborhoods was a major cause of the mortgage crisis. If Obama has his way, that pressure will increase. The House earlier approved Obama’s proposal to create a politically-correct entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.” It would do so without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness, even though the Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

Hans Bader is Counsel for Special Projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Coming to CEI in 2003, Hans’s prior casework has included suits involving the First Amendment, federalism, and civil rights issues.