re: #254 albusteve

Barney was highly protective of FM/FM and continuously claimed neither was in financial trouble…both Bush and McCain warned about dire situation they were approaching but it led to nothing…Frank and Schumer both should have been tossed to the mat over that fiasco…but they had their sweetheart deals too

But Fannie and Freddie were the absolute least of the crisis. We nearly had our financial system melt down because a bunch of non-bank lenders (Countrywide, New Century, etc…) wrote a bunch of crap mortgages that were designed to implode if real estate values didn’t keep climbing. Add to that the investment bank alchemy of taking the B+ tranches of thsoe securitized loans and magically converting them into AAA (with the help/connivance of the rating agencies) and the next thing you know you have destroyed a trillion dollars of wealth.

Fannie and Freddie were five steps behind the whole time. They were late to the dance. But there are a bunch of people that need to make the credit crisis about the government because they can’t otherwise process the event. They are fools.