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Why the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailout happened

Started by nmindependent · 9 months ago

From local home mortgages to international financial markets, the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has universal implications. The most telling sign of the magnitude of the situation is what the intervention may have prevented from happening. With a portfolio of nearly $5 trillion% ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • thomasjames

    10 months ago

    The is just another horrible choice by Congress and Bush to put a band-aid on a bullet wound. Except now by putting our federal band-aid soon to be hemorrhaging fatal wound we have passed the buck to every tax payer in the United States.

    Erin Quinn is wrong these GSE's are unconstitutional and we shouldn't have them.
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  • bleve

    10 months ago

    Thomasjames, there's a lot of people that agree with you. If you go to the NPR link referenced in the article, John Snow, Bush's former Treasure Secretary says:

    "It is just not appropriate to have the tax-payers holding the bag for private managements."

    "Our system doesn't work well, where the gains are privatized but the losses are born by you and me and John Q. Public as the tax-payers."

    When discussing the bailout many people focus on the "they're too big to fail" issue, which refers to the present, and its true. If they were allowed to fail, you, me, every small business in the country would no longer be able to get a loan. Lenders would for all intents and purposes, stop lending money to the average person.

    But of course it could have been avoided with proper oversight. For decades GSE's helped millions of Americans attain home ownership, the problem is that any financial institution allowed to run amok... will run amok.

    The lack of oversight from the government to the lending institutions to the brokers all got greedy and failed to heed even their own internal policies for safeguards.

    Dems and Republicans in Congress and at the state level are all culpable.
    reply
  • thomasjames

    10 months ago

    Thats fine I understand the point that they are too big to fail, but short term that might be true but the real truth is that they will eventually. This is a market correction and as long as you delay surgery the worse the patient becomes. I understand that GSE's helped American's attain home ownership that does not make them constitutional.

    The problem is the millions of Americans had now business getting the loans that allowed them homeownership. It was greedy lending that landed us in this situation and passing the buck to our children in the form of more debt is morally wrong.
    reply
  • thomasjames

    10 months ago

    "had no" not "had now" sorry
    reply
  • calangoverde

    10 months ago

    I have been wondering if this is what they call "nationalizing"? If it is, where are all of the critics that critisized Hugo Chaves' nationalizing of the oil companies of Venezuela. It seems to me that Mr. Chaves did the opposite of what happened here, he nationalized a business that was doing well. Do the people of Venezuela get some sort of dividend from the oil industry or do the profits get funneled into preexisting social programs? Does anybody have any information regarding Mr. Chaves' response to what has transpired with Fannie and Freddie?
    reply
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