Fannie Mae will need a bailout (prophesy)
By Divorced one like Bush
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
New York Times, 9/30…………………………………..1999.
Who is Mr. Peter Wallison:
A codirector of AEI’s program on financial markets deregulation, Wallison studies banking, insurance, and Wall Street regulation. As general counsel of the U.S. Treasury department, he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration’s proposals for the deregulation of the financial services industry.
Interestingly enough, he produced a paperputting it on the dems for the mess in that they wanted “regulation” when the issue was the crap in the portfolio. He quote Greenspan at a subcommittee hearing in 2005:
“We have found no reasonable basis for that portfolio above very minimum needs.” He then proposed “a $100 billion, $200 billion–whatever the number might turn out to be–limit on the size of the aggregate portfolios of those institutions–and the reason I say that is there are certain purposes which I can see in the holding of mortgages which might be helpful in a number of different areas. But $900 billion for Fannie and somewhat less, obviously, for Freddie, I don’t see the purpose of it.” Greenspan then articulated his reasons for limiting the GSEs’ portfolios: “If [Fannie and Freddie] continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road.” He added, “Enabling these institutions to increase in size–and they will, once the crisis, in their judgment, passes–we are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”[2]
And the republicans were the ones, proposing proper regulations, but Fannie went to the dems to stop it:
Thus, in January 2005, three Senators–Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), and Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.)–had introduced tough new legislation to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The legislation was state-of-the-art at the time, and included a carefully developed “bright line” test that was intended to end Fannie’s and Freddie’s efforts to break out of the secondary mortgage market as their sole allowable field of operations. But the legislation made no mention of limiting the GSEs’ portfolios.
Sometime you just don’t know what to expect from people based on their ideology. Who knew AEI could understand the Fannie mess to the point of being a profit and yet find that calling for limits to size is not “regulation” because regulation is what the dems want.
American Enterprise Institute: The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is an extremely influential, pro-business right-wing think tank founded in 1943 by Lewis H. Brown. It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism[1], and succeeds in placing its people in influential governmental positions. It is the center base for many neo-conservatives.
An example of some of their finer work:
In 1980, the American Enterprise Institute for the sum of $25,000 produced a study in support of the tobacco industry titled, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Regulation: Consumer Products. The study was designed to counteract “social cost” arguments against smoking by broadening the social cost issue to include other consumer products such as alcohol and saccharin.
One can also use Wiki if you do not like Source Watch.