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Originally posted by SimonWho:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aeLS30YslYd8&refer
=home

Congratulations to Bush & The Republican Party. Quite some achievement.

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Originally posted by rue:
Rap

"Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are to blame, more than any other.
Thanks to the Democrats who screwed the country after M. Pelosi rode into town and set up shop."

This is why people have written you off as a nut-job.

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Silence is consent.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

Your ignorance isn't reason enough for me to stop stating the facts.

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I have dealt w/ young Earth Creationist...

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...and they are absolutely no different from the likes of you. Herd mentality, blind faith in that which they have been told to believe, adherence to their ideology, far and above anything to do w/ the REAL world.

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You, as they , reject and vilify reality, for it threatens the very foundation on which you base your belief system.

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"Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are to blame, more than any other.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
socialist regime

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Originally posted by RiverDancer:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
socialist

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SQUAAAAAWWK!!!

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In late 2004, the leadership of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or Fannie Mae) was accused of having engaged in a series of questionable accounting practices that led to an overstatement of its earnings and an understatement of its risk. Although Fannie Mae’s top officers denied the accusations, a careful review by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed the allegations. Within a few weeks, Fannie Mae conceded the charges and its top officers were forced to resign. Any doubts about the seriousness of the company’s shaky finances were laid to rest on January 19, 2005, when Fannie Mae cut its dividend in half to bolster its cash reserves.

Since then, Congress has held a series of hearings on Fannie Mae’s predicament and how to reform it. In the last week of May 2005, the House Committee on Financial Services proposed a series of regulatory changes that it claims would rectify the problem. However, critics of the FNMA, many of its private-sector competitors, and White House officials con tend that these proposals are too timid and that the new regulatory environment would sustain the pow erful co-monopolistic position that it shares with the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC or Freddie Mac), which suffered its own accounting and ethical lapses in 2003.

A better and more effective alternative is to phase out their generous federal credit privileges, allowing these financial giants time to adjust to a more compet itive environment. To implement this orderly with drawal of federal support, Congress should:

Phase out Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s lines of credit with the U.S. Treasury over five years in annual increments of $500 million for each government-sponsored enterprise (GSE),
Eliminate immediately the Federal Reserve’s authority to buy their debt, and
Eliminate the GSEs’ exemption from state and local income taxes.
As the phaseout proceeds, Fannie Mae and Fred die Mac should:

Conduct an orderly reduction in their holdings of residential mortgages (the profits from these investments depend largely on their ability to borrow at subsidized rates) and
Concentrate their skilled workforces on secu ritizing residential mortgages in fair and open competition with the private sector.
These legislative changes would greatly reduce the risk to financial markets and taxpayer expo sure. They would also restore competition in resi dential mortgage markets while leaving the housing industry and homeownership opportuni ties unaffected.

Making the Most of the Opportunity

While Members of the 109th Congress are to be commended for taking on these two political pow erhouses, the legislative package reported out by the House Committee on Financial Services in late May 2005 (H.R. 1461) falls short of what is needed. It will do little to address the fundamental prob lems associated with these federally supported financial monopolies that provide limited benefit to the housing finance market or homeownership opportunities.

Notwithstanding press reports that the new leg islation would “create a new more powerful regula tor for financial services giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,”[1] some GSE reform advocates and Bush Administration officials view it as too weak and contend that the new regulatory system is less restrictive than the current one.[2] In addition, the new proposal would require Fannie Mae and Fred die Mac to use 5 percent of their profits to fund “affordable” housing programs. This is a clumsy and costly effort to contrive a public purpose for these enterprises, which have long outlived any justification for the valuable privileges that they receive from the federal government.

The failure of Congress to address these broader issues stems from a flawed reform process that focused on Fannie Mae’s Enron-like behavior instead of the statutory privileges that have allowed it to amass enormous market power. Together, these two GSEs control half of the residential mort gage market, deterring competition and forcing the housing and housing finance markets to rely on two financially unstable co-monopolists. With such market power concentrated in the hands of only two companies, the stability of U.S. financial markets could be undermined by financial prob lems in just one of them. Of course, if a bailout ever becomes necessary, the taxpayers could end up paying the bill.

In recent years, there have been a number of pro posals to reform these GSEs. Some involve more regulation, others urge the creation of more GSEs to foster competition among government-subsidized entities, and still others would eliminate the statu tory privileges that tie the GSEs to the taxpayer.

New regulations have attracted the most sup port, but this could turn out to be a useless and counterproductive approach. If the GSEs provide little or no benefit to society—beyond enriching their leaders and the various contractors who serve them—there is little point in trying to limit their risk with regulations and expose the taxpayers to a costly bailout. The co-monopolists would likely survive and thrive under a regulatory solution that would preserve the unhealthy concentration of risk, privilege, and power in the two companies.

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have proven exceptionally adept at lobbying Congress to pre serve and enhance their privileges. Any effort that relies on new regulations will likely perpetuate the risk to the financial market and preserve their dom inant influence. Indeed, if Armando Falcon, direc tor of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), had not courageously per sisted in exposing Fannie Mae’s suspect operations, often in the face of congressional hostility, former Fannie Mae President Franklin Raines would still have his job and Fannie Mae’s shaky finances and fabricated earnings would still be hidden.

Instead of adopting compromise regulations, the government should begin an orderly process of severing all ties with the GSEs. Their most valuable federal privileges are their $2.25 billion lines of credit (for a total of $4.5 billion) with the U.S. Trea sury and the Federal Reserve’s authority to buy their debt as part of its open market operations. These privileges allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to claim an implicit federal guarantee of their outstanding obligations, which in turn makes them a popular investment for many major institutions, pension funds, and even foreign central banks. By lowering their borrowing costs and giving them access to subsidized credit, this implicit guarantee has allowed them to outcompete their private-sec tor rivals and establish a monopoly presence in the financial markets.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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Originally posted by RiverDancer:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
socialist

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SQUAAAAAWWK!!!

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That's like calling someone a rapist and having some idiot reply

" squaaaaawwk!! "

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Originally posted by RiverDancer:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
socialist regime

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SQUAAAAAWWK!!!

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
kwoockoo not posted in a bit? Gee, when he reads all that info that AuRaptor has again posted for the slow, before kwoockoo gets his blinders back on, his head is gonna explode. Not so fun to see what comes out, but interesting to see how much garbage he posts after facts are repeatedly thrust into his face. And just how much twisting he must do to rearrange AuRap's facts into the kwoockoo delusional mush.

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Originally posted by RiverDancer:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
socialist regime

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SQUAAAAAWWK!!!

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Are you still calling yourself a non-liberal, or non-socialist, or non-fascist, or non-Nazi, or conservative, or whatever it is you deluded yourself into thinking?

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Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are to blame, more than any other.

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But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter. What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets... Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Are you still calling yourself a non-liberal, or non-socialist, or non-fascist, or non-Nazi, or conservative, or whatever it is you deluded yourself into thinking?

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The fundamentals of our economy are strong.

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Originally posted by RiverDancer:

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Are you still calling yourself a non-liberal, or non-socialist, or non-fascist, or non-Nazi, or conservative, or whatever it is you deluded yourself into thinking?

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Actually, I've never said I wasn't a liberal. Others who argue against you have stated, quite factually, that they don't fall into the category of liberal, but some other category that also happens to disagree with you. It's interesting to me that you lump liberals, fascists, Nazis, and socialists all together as the same thing, when clearly they are not. Knowing that's how you think clears up a great deal to me.
Let me try to explain something to you:
The United States is a capitalist/socialist nation. Oh yes, it is. Our education system, by and large, is socialized. There's private school as well, but a large percentage of schools are government run and government funded through the use of taxes. This is a very simple and widely-known fact that you seem to overlook on a regular basis when you're bleating about the evils of socialism. (Not that I think the education system is perfect, but that's a different can of worms of another day.) Likewise, our transportation system is socialized, almost entirely. Roads are paid for by the government, through the use of taxes. Public transportation, by its very definition, is paid for largely by the city government, with a little help from those who actually use it in the form of a small fare. These are both prominent socialized aspects to the capitalist society. Now, it's definitely important to do it right, but socialized things are not inherently evil. Yet any time the concept of socialized medicine is even mentioned, there's this segment of the population that starts screaming like their feet are being tickled by the fires of hell. I don't understand this at all. You already live in a place where the socialized can coexist peacefully with other options, and by and large not interfere with your precious capitalist companies. So why are you screaming like this is some great and fearful unknown? And why do you think that you will not take any benefit from it yourself? Is it only us crazy liberals who will be allowed to take advantage of doctor visits paid for by the state? Regular free dental care? Available emergency care in all places for all persons? What, do you never get sick or have cavities or break your thumb trying to put up a shelf in your garage? Do you never have car accidents or children with a terrible fever? C'mon.

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