Tuesday, September 23, 2008

How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis

Subprime Loans Labeled 'Affordable'
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post
June 10, 2008

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more "affordable" loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.

Housing experts and some congressional leaders now view those decisions as mistakes that contributed to an escalation of subprime lending that is roiling the U.S. economy.

The agency neglected to examine whether borrowers could make the payments on the loans that Freddie and Fannie classified as affordable. From 2004 to 2006, the two purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans, creating a market for more such lending. Subprime loans are targeted toward borrowers with poor credit, and they generally carry higher interest rates than conventional loans.

Today, 3 million to 4 million families are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure because they cannot afford their high-interest subprime loans. Lower-income and minority home buyers -- those who were supposed to benefit from HUD's actions -- are falling into default at a rate at least three times that of other borrowers.

"For HUD to be indifferent as to whether these loans were hurting people or helping them is really an abject failure to regulate," said Michael Barr, a University of Michigan law professor who is advising Congress. "It was just irresponsible."

Congress is expected to vote before its Fourth of July recess on legislation that would strip HUD of its regulatory authority over Fannie and Freddie and give it to a stronger regulator.
Fannie and Freddie finance about 40 percent of all U.S. mortgages, with $5.3 trillion in outstanding debt. Owned by private shareholders but chartered by Congress, they are exempt from state and local taxes and receive an estimated $6.5 billion-a-year federal subsidy because they can borrow money more cheaply than other investors. In return, they are expected to serve "public purposes," including helping to make home buying more affordable.

HUD officials dispute allegations that the agency encouraged abusive lending and sloppy underwriting standards that became the hallmark of the subprime industry. Spokesman Brian Sullivan said the agency and Congress wanted to increase homeownership among underserved families and could not have predicted that subprime lending would dominate the market so quickly.

"Congress and HUD policy folks were trying to do a good thing," he said, "and it worked."
Since HUD became their regulator in 1992, Fannie and Freddie each year are supposed to buy a portion of "affordable" mortgages made to underserved borrowers. Every four years, HUD reviews the goals to adapt to market changes.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton's HUD agreed to let Fannie and Freddie get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers. The idea was that subprime lending benefited many borrowers who did not qualify for conventional loans. HUD expected that Freddie and Fannie would impose their high lending standards on subprime lenders.

Banks typically back prime loans with customers' deposits. But subprime lenders often rely on money from Wall Street investors , who buy packages of loans as investments called mortgage-backed securities.

In 2000, as HUD revisited its affordable-housing goals, the housing market had shifted. With escalating home prices, subprime loans were more popular. Consumer advocates warned that lenders were trapping borrowers with low "teaser" interest rates and ignoring borrowers' qualifications.

HUD restricted Freddie and Fannie, saying it would not credit them for loans they purchased that had abusively high costs or that were granted without regard to the borrower's ability to repay. Freddie and Fannie adopted policies not to buy some high-cost loans.

That year, Freddie bought $18.6 billion in subprime loans; Fannie did not disclose its number.
In 2001, HUD researchers warned of high foreclosure rates among subprime loans.

"Given the very high concentration of these loans in low-income and African American neighborhoods, the growth in subprime lending and resulting very high levels of foreclosure is a real cause for concern," an agency report said.

But by 2004, when HUD next revised the goals, Freddie and Fannie's purchases of subprime-backed securities had risen tenfold. Foreclosure rates also were rising.

That year, President Bush's HUD ratcheted up the main affordable-housing goal over the next four years, from 50 percent to 56 percent. John C. Weicher, then an assistant HUD secretary, said the institutions lagged behind even the private market and "must do more."

For Wall Street, high profits could be made from securities backed by subprime loans. Fannie and Freddie targeted the least-risky loans. Still, their purchases provided more cash for a larger subprime market.

"That was a huge, huge mistake," said Patricia McCoy, who teaches securities law at the University of Connecticut. "That just pumped more capital into a very unregulated market that has turned out to be a disaster."

In 2003, the two bought $81 billion in subprime securities. In 2004, they purchased $175 billion -- 44 percent of the market. In 2005, they bought $169 billion, or 33 percent. In 2006, they cut back to $90 billion, or 20 percent. Generally, Freddie purchased more than Fannie and relied more heavily on the securities to meet goals.

"The market knew we needed those loans," said Sharon McHale, a spokeswoman for Freddie Mac. The higher goals "forced us to go into that market to serve the targeted populations that HUD wanted us to serve," she said.

But because Fannie and Freddie were buying mortgage-backed securities rather than the actual subprime loans, their involvement came too late to require stiffer standards from lenders.
Fannie and Freddie "made no progress in civilizing the market," said Sandra Fostek, a senior regulator at HUD.

William C. Apgar Jr., who was an assistant HUD secretary under Clinton, said he regrets allowing the companies to count subprime securities as affordable.

"It was a mistake," he said. "In hindsight, I would have done it differently."

Allen Fishbein, who was Apgar's adviser at HUD and is now at the Consumer Federation of America, said the agency failed to use its regulatory power by refusing to credit Fannie and Freddie for loans that were "contrary to good lending practices."

"They chose not to put the brakes on this dangerous lending when they could have," Fishbein said.
Fostek said the agency had no practical way to comb through the tens of millions of individual loans contained in the subprime securities. She said that Fannie and Freddie did not overwhelmingly rely on securities to meet the goals but added that she would not disclose the amount counted because it is considered proprietary.

Fannie and Freddie spokespeople say their partners had agreed not to sell them loans with several prohibited characteristics, including credit insurance, excessively high costs and prepayment penalties that lasted longer than three years. But experts say the volume of subprime foreclosures proves they were toxic to borrowers.

Judith Kennedy, president of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, said that while Fannie and Freddie nurtured unregulated subprime lenders, an estimated 30 percent of subprime borrowers could have qualified for safe, lower-cost prime loans.

"The damage to homeowners, to neighborhoods, to state and local governments as the tax base erodes, and now to all American taxpayers, is almost incalculable," she said.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate banking committee who brokered some of the regulatory reform in the pending bill, said HUD's homeownership push ignored reality.

"We need to focus on putting families in homes they can truly afford, not just on getting a sale, packaging the loan into a sophisticated financial security and walking away to the next closing," he said. "Today, people are wondering, 'Why weren't the regulators and the industry probing these [loans] more deeply?' "

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report

At Freddie Mac, Chief Discarded Warning Signs

By CHARLES DUHIGG
The New York Times
Published: August 5, 2008

The chief executive of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac rejected internal warnings that could have protected the company from some of the financial crises now engulfing it, according to more than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives and others.

That chief executive, Richard F. Syron, in 2004 received a memo from Freddie Mac’s chief risk officer warning him that the firm was financing questionable loans that threatened its financial health.

Today, Freddie Mac and the nation’s other major mortgage finance company, Fannie Mae, are in such perilous condition that the federal government has readied a taxpayer-financed bailout that could cost billions. Though the current housing crisis would have undoubtedly caused problems at both companies, Freddie Mac insiders say Mr. Syron heightened those perils by ignoring repeated recommendations.

In an interview, Freddie Mac’s former chief risk officer, David A. Andrukonis, recalled telling Mr. Syron in mid-2004 that the company was buying bad loans that “would likely pose an enormous financial and reputational risk to the company and the country.”

Mr. Syron received a memo stating that the firm’s underwriting standards were becoming shoddier and that the company was becoming exposed to losses, according to Mr. Andrukonis and two others familiar with the document.

But as they sat in a conference room, Mr. Syron refused to consider possibilities for reducing Freddie Mac’s risks, said Mr. Andrukonis, who left in 2005 to become a teacher.
“He said we couldn’t afford to say no to anyone,” Mr. Andrukonis said. Over the next three years, Freddie Mac continued buying riskier loans.

Mr. Syron contends his options were limited.

“If I had better foresight, maybe I could have improved things a little bit,” he said. “But frankly, if I had perfect foresight, I would never have taken this job in the first place.”
Mr. Andrukonis was not the only cautionary voice at Freddie Mac at the time. According to many executives, Mr. Syron was also warned that the firm needed to expand its capital cushion, but instead that safety net shrank. Mr. Syron was told to slow the firm’s mortgage purchases. Instead, they accelerated.

Those and other choices initially paid off for Mr. Syron, who has collected more than $38 million in compensation since 2003. But when housing prices began declining in 2006, choices at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae proved disastrous. Stock prices at both companies have fallen by more than 60 percent since February, destroying more than $80 billion of shareholder value.

More than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives at Freddie Mac, analysts, shareholders and regulators said in interviews that Mr. Syron had ignored recommendations that could have helped avoid the current crisis. Many of those interviewed were given anonymity for fear of damaging their careers by speaking publicly.

Now, some outsiders are saying that Mr. Syron and the top executive at Fannie Mae — some of the highest-profile figures in the business world — should be replaced.
“The top people should be booted out, and replaced by executives who have the confidence of the markets,” said Janet Tavakoli, a finance industry consultant and observer of both firms. Large Freddie Mac shareholders, speaking on the condition of anonymity, echoed those sentiments.

Mr. Syron and the Fannie Mae chief executive, Daniel H. Mudd, defended their choices, saying in interviews that they did not anticipate that the housing market would decline so quickly and that they were buffeted by conflicting pressures.

“This company has to answer to shareholders, to our regulator and to Congress, and those groups often demand completely contradictory things,” Mr. Syron said in an interview.
Indeed, executives of both companies maintain that one of the reasons the firms hold so many bad loans is that Congress has leaned on them for years to buy mortgages from low-income borrowers to encourage affordable housing. In 2004, Freddie Mac warned regulators that affordable housing goals could force the company to buy riskier loans.

Others, however, dismiss that explanation. “Sure, it’s hard to deal with the pressures of Congress and shareholders and regulators,” said a former high-ranking Freddie Mac executive. “But that’s why executives get paid so much. It’s not acceptable to blame those pressures for making bad choices.”

In a statement, Freddie Mac said executives were unable to verify that Mr. Andrukonis’s memorandum existed, and that the company’s default and delinquency rates were substantially lower than other firms. “There is little to nothing that Freddie Mac could have done to prevent the losses that it is now incurring,” wrote company spokesman, David R. Palombi.
Mr. Mudd said the companies were victims of circumstance.

“You’ve got the worst housing crisis in U.S. recorded history, and we’re the largest housing finance company in the country, so when one goes down, the other goes with it,” he said. A Fannie Mae spokesman, Brian A. Faith, said that beginning in 2005, executives “sounded the alarm” about riskier loans and began limiting their purchases.

The depths of Freddie Mac’s problems are complicated by its long-planned, continuing search for a chief executive to replace Mr. Syron, who is expected to remain chairman. Two people who were approached — Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express and Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock — said they did not want to be considered for the position.

Some outsiders are surprised to learn that among the candidates the company is considering is Alan Schwartz, who headed Bear Stearns as it collapsed. Mr. Chenault, Mr. Fink and Mr. Schwartz could not be reached or declined to comment.

Mr. Syron joined Freddie Mac as chief executive and chairman in 2003, after the company revealed it had manipulated earnings by almost $5 billion. He came to Freddie Mac after serving as chairman of the Thermo Electron Corporation, a scientific instruments firm, and of the American Stock Exchange. An economist with a Ph.D. and the first in his family to graduate from high school, Mr. Syron was welcomed as an unpretentious but politically astute leader.
Mr. Mudd was promoted to chief executive of Fannie Mae the following year, after that company was also accused of accounting errors totaling $6.3 billion. His compensation has totaled more than $42 million.

By the time both men took over, the firms had perfected the art of making money by capitalizing on the perception they were implicitly backed by the government. That belief allowed Fannie and Freddie to borrow at relatively low rates and use those funds to buy mortgages as investments. The companies also collected fees in exchange for guaranteeing that borrowers would repay other home loans. By the end of 2007, the firms held mortgages worth more than $1.4 trillion combined, and guaranteed payments on loans worth $3.5 trillion more.

Both firms had sophisticated systems to hedge against risks. But they remained exposed to one unlikely, but potentially catastrophic possibility: a wide-scale decline in national home prices.
The only real protection against such a downfall was purchasing only the safest loans.

However, the companies were constantly under pressure to buy riskier mortgages. Once, a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers, according to a Congressional source. Shareholders attacked the executives for missing profitable opportunities by being too cautious. Mr. Syron and Mr. Mudd eventually yielded to those pressures, effectively wagering that if things got too bad, the government would bail them out.

“The thinking was that if something really bad happened to the housing market, then the government would need Freddie and Fannie more than ever, and would have to rescue them,” Mr. Andrukonis said. “Everybody understood that at some level the company was putting taxpayers at risk.”

Representatives of Mr. Syron and Mr. Mudd said the firms never made choices assuming the government would intervene. Both said they balanced shareholder and Congressional demands against market realities.

For years, the companies collected rich profits. But some executives grew increasingly concerned.

Mr. Andrukonis wrote his memo in 2004. At the time, he also briefed the risk oversight committee of the board of directors, but did not share his memo with them, he said. A member of that committee declined to return phone calls.

Soon thereafter, Freddie Mac’s head of capital compliance and oversight, Donald Solberg, counseled Mr. Syron to maintain a thick capital cushion, according to multiple people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Solberg continued making that recommendation until early 2007, when he left the company. Mr. Solberg declined to comment on his conversations.
Last year, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, privately urged both companies to raise more money. At one point, Mr. Bernanke threatened to publicly scold the companies if they did not raise more cash.

Beginning in November, Fannie Mae raised $14.4 billion from shareholders over a six-month period. But Mr. Syron was more resistant. Freddie Mac raised $6 billion in preferred stock last year, but at a March conference in New York, Mr. Syron combatively dismissed suggestions he would raise more simply because officials told him to.

“This company will bow to no one,” Mr. Syron told a room of investors and analysts. Despite promises, the company has delayed a planned $5.5 billion stock sale. Because of that delay, the effective cost of raising funds has skyrocketed as the company’s share price has declined.
In a statement, Freddie Mac said Mr. Syron’s March comments focused on dilutive capital raising and that the stock sale was delayed because lawyers said it could not occur while the company was registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That process was finalized last month.

In 2007, as home prices were falling and defaults rising in some areas, people at both firms urged their chief executives to scale back on mortgage purchases. Fannie Mae shrunk its mortgage portfolio slightly.

Mr. Syron’s Freddie Mac, however, increased its portfolio by $17 billion.
That same year the companies posted combined losses of $5.2 billion. This year, they have announced losses of $2.4 billion, and analysts say they may lose an additional $24 billion or more.
Last month, after weeks of rumors and bad news, investors began dumping the companies’ shares, driving their stock prices down almost 60 percent apiece. The selling did not subside until Mr. Paulson unveiled a rescue plan with powers to inject billions of taxpayer dollars into the companies. That plan has not been activated, but the law, signed by President Bush last week, also gives the government sweeping new regulatory control over the firms.

“It basically worked exactly as everyone expected — when things got bad, the government came to the rescue,” said a second former high-ranking Freddie Mac executive. “But we didn’t expect it would come at the cost of a new regulator who now has the power to burrow into our business forever.”

In the last three weeks, the companies’ stock prices have recovered a small portion of their losses. Executives, however, remain concerned that more bad news could spark another panic.
Freddie Mac will report its second-quarter financial results Wednesday. Fannie Mae will release its results on Friday.

“I’ve had four other jobs as C.E.O., and I came out of them all pretty well,” Mr. Syron said.

“What I’m working for right now is to save my reputation.”

Eric Dash contributed reporting.

Blame Fannie Mae and Congress

By CHARLES W. CALOMIRIS and PETER J. WALLISON
The Wall Street Journal
September 23, 2008

Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) -- and their sponsors in Washington -- are largely to blame for our current mess.

How did we get here? Let's review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse.

It is important to understand that, as GSEs, Fannie and Freddie were viewed in the capital markets as government-backed buyers (a belief that has now been reduced to fact). Thus they were able to borrow as much as they wanted for the purpose of buying mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Their buying patterns and interests were followed closely in the markets. If Fannie and Freddie wanted subprime or Alt-A loans, the mortgage markets would produce them. By late 2004, Fannie and Freddie very much wanted subprime and Alt-A loans. Their accounting had just been revealed as fraudulent, and they were under pressure from Congress to demonstrate that they deserved their considerable privileges. Among other problems, economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office had begun to study them in detail, and found that -- despite their subsidized borrowing rates -- they did not significantly reduce mortgage interest rates. In the wake of Freddie's 2003 accounting scandal, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan became a powerful opponent, and began to call for stricter regulation of the GSEs and limitations on the growth of their highly profitable, but risky, retained portfolios.

If they were not making mortgages cheaper and were creating risks for the taxpayers and the economy, what value were they providing? The answer was their affordable-housing mission. So it was that, beginning in 2004, their portfolios of subprime and Alt-A loans and securities began to grow. Subprime and Alt-A originations in the U.S. rose from less than 8% of all mortgages in 2003 to over 20% in 2006. During this period the quality of subprime loans also declined, going from fixed rate, long-term amortizing loans to loans with low down payments and low (but adjustable) initial rates, indicating that originators were scraping the bottom of the barrel to find product for buyers like the GSEs.

The strategy of presenting themselves to Congress as the champions of affordable housing appears to have worked. Fannie and Freddie retained the support of many in Congress, particularly Democrats, and they were allowed to continue unrestrained. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass), for example, now the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, openly described the "arrangement" with the GSEs at a committee hearing on GSE reform in 2003: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable . . . a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing." The hint to Fannie and Freddie was obvious: Concentrate on affordable housing and, despite your problems, your congressional support is secure.

In light of the collapse of Fannie and Freddie, both John McCain and Barack Obama now criticize the risk-tolerant regulatory regime that produced the current crisis. But Sen. McCain's criticisms are at least credible, since he has been pointing to systemic risks in the mortgage market and trying to do something about them for years. In contrast, Sen. Obama's conversion as a financial reformer marks a reversal from his actions in previous years, when he did nothing to disturb the status quo. The first head of Mr. Obama's vice-presidential search committee, Jim Johnson, a former chairman of Fannie Mae, was the one who announced Fannie's original affordable-housing program in 1991 -- just as Congress was taking up the first GSE regulatory legislation.

In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby. The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006. All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on "deregulation." This is a canard. There has indeed been deregulation in our economy -- in long-distance telephone rates, airline fares, securities brokerage and trucking, to name just a few -- and this has produced much innovation and lower consumer prices. But the primary "deregulation" in the financial world in the last 30 years permitted banks to diversify their risks geographically and across different products, which is one of the things that has kept banks relatively stable in this storm.

As a result, U.S. commercial banks have been able to attract more than $100 billion of new capital in the past year to replace most of their subprime-related write-downs. Deregulation of branching restrictions and limitations on bank product offerings also made possible bank acquisition of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, saving billions in likely resolution costs for taxpayers.

If the Democrats had let the 2005 legislation come to a vote, the huge growth in the subprime and Alt-A loan portfolios of Fannie and Freddie could not have occurred, and the scale of the financial meltdown would have been substantially less. The same politicians who today decry the lack of intervention to stop excess risk taking in 2005-2006 were the ones who blocked the only legislative effort that could have stopped it.

Mr. Calomiris is a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was general counsel of the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie

How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis
By Wayne Barrett
published: August 05, 2008

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York's attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie.

It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called "the gods of Washington" was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.

With that many pols at the helm, it's no wonder that most analysts have portrayed Fannie and Freddie as if they were unregulated renegades, and rarely mentioned HUD in the ongoing finger-pointing exercise that has ranged, appropriately enough, from Wall Street to Alan Greenspan. But the near-collapse of these dual pillars in recent weeks is rooted in the HUD junkyard, where every Cuomo decision discussed here was later ratified by his Bush successors.

And that's not an accident: Perhaps the only domestic issue George Bush and Bill Clinton were in complete agreement about was maximizing home ownership, each trying to lay claim to a record percentage of homeowners, and both describing their efforts as a boon to blacks and Hispanics. HUD, Fannie, and Freddie were their instruments, and, as is now apparent, the more unsavory the means, the greater the growth. But, as Paul Krugman noted in the Times recently, "homeownership isn't for everyone," adding that as many as 10 million of the new buyers are stuck now with negative home equity—meaning that with falling house prices, their mortgages exceed the value of their homes. So many others have gone through foreclosure that there's been a net loss in home ownership since 1998.

It is also worth remembering that the motive for this bipartisan ownership expansion probably had more to do with the legion of lobbyists working for lenders, brokers, and Wall Street than an effort to walk in MLK's footsteps. Each mortgage was a commodity that could be sold again and again—from the brokers to the bankers to the securities market. If, at the bottom of this pyramid, the borrower collapsed under the weight of his mortgage's impossible terms, the home could be repackaged a second or a third time and either refinanced or dumped on a new victim.

Those are the interests that surrounded Cuomo, who did more to set these forces of unregulated expansion in motion than any other secretary and then boasted about it, presenting his initiatives as crusades for racial and social justice.

Cuomo was shrewd enough at the age of 24 to manage his father's successful 1982 gubernatorial campaign, and to help run his government. The only statewide campaign his father ever lost was in 1994—when Andrew was at HUD as an assistant secretary and couldn't manage it. He is as quick and as silver-tongued as the elder Cuomo he sounds so much like, but HUD was a test of his depth, so he found himself balancing competing forces and making deals on a grander scale than he was used to in Albany. We now know that he was also making history.

In 2000, Cuomo required a quantum leap in the number of affordable, low-to-moderate-income loans that the two mortgage banks—known collectively as Government Sponsored Enterprises—would have to buy. The GSEs don't actually sell mortgages to borrowers. They buy them from banks and mortgage companies, allowing lenders to replenish their capital and make more loans. They also purchase mortgage-backed securities, which are pools of mortgages regularly acquired by the GSEs from investment firms. The government chartered these banks to pump money into the mortgage market and, while they did it, to make a strong enough profit to attract shareholders. That created a tug-of-war between their efforts to maximize shareholder value, which drove them toward high-end mortgages, and their congressionally mandated obligation to finance loans for those who needed help. The 1992 law required HUD's secretary to make sure housing goals were being met and, every four years, set new goals for Fannie and Freddie.

Cuomo's predecessor, Henry Cisneros, did that for the first time in December 1995, taking a cautious approach and moving the GSEs toward a requirement that 42 percent of their mortgages serve low- and moderate-income families. Cuomo raised that number to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages in underserved neighborhoods and for the "very-low-income." Part of the pitch was racial, with Cuomo contending that Fannie and Freddie weren't granting mortgages to minorities at the same rate as the private market. William Apgar, Cuomo's top aide, told The Washington Post: "We believe that there are a lot of loans to black Americans that could be safely purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if these companies were more flexible."

While many saw this demand for increasingly "flexible" loan terms and standards as a positive step for low-income and minority families, others warned that they could have potentially dangerous consequences. Franklin Raines, the Fannie chairman and first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company, warned that Cuomo's rules were moving Fannie into risky territory: "We have not been a major presence in the subprime market," he said, "but you can bet that under these goals, we will be." Fannie's chief financial officer, Timothy Howard, said that "making loans to people with less-than-perfect credit" is "something we should do." Cuomo wasn't shy about embracing subprime mortgages as a possible consequence of his goals. "GSE presence in the subprime market could be of significant benefit to lower-income families, minorities, and families living in underserved areas," his report on the new goals noted.

Moody's didn't sound an immediate alarm, but its senior analyst, Stanislas Rouyer, said the expansion into subprime loans and the lower level of documentation that came with them could mean that Fannie 's loss levels would increase in the future. Steven Holmes, a reporter from the Times's Washington bureau, wrote at the time: "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But," he added, "the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s."

When HUD released the next set of goals in 2004, it reported that after Cuomo's previous edict, there had been a sudden spurt of GSE subprime investment, "partly in response to higher affordable-housing goals set by HUD in 2000." Fannie had gone from $1.2 billion in subprime-mortgage and securities purchases in 2000 to $9.2 billion in 2001 and $15 billion in 2002. Freddie's numbers were murkier, but clearly also on the rise. In 2003 alone, the two bought $81 billion in subprime securities—which also count against the goals.

Fannie also developed a "flexible" product line, providing up to 100 percent financing and requiring borrowers to make as little as a $500 contribution, and bought $13.7 billion of those loans in 2003. In addition to subprime loans and securities, both banks burst into the "alt-a" market, making alternative products easily available to borrowers who had slightly better credit histories than subprime borrowers, but were unwilling to provide full documentation of their financial histories. (It was the "alt-a" investments that recently brought down the private bank IndyMac.) These risky adventures, according to the 2004 HUD report, prompted Freddie to claim that "the increased goals created tension in its business practices between meeting the goals and conducting responsible lending practices," a self-serving attempt to plant the blame back on HUD.

After this initial uptick, the two banks purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans between 2004 and 2006. The Washington Post noted this June that the GSEs' aggressive acquisitions "created a market for more such lending" by others, feeding the fire. No one knows just how big a bite the subprime mess is now taking out of the GSEs, or how much of that portfolio will ultimately go bad, but it has become axiomatic that, whatever the total, it is too much, since it will have seriously shaken confidence in these two linchpin institutions.

That June Post story focused its critical reassessment of HUD's affordable-housing goals on the department's 2004 decision—during the Bush re-election campaign—to juice them up again, pushing the target to 56 percent by 2007. Though the story never mentioned Cuomo—whose three-year, eight-point goal hike exceeded Bush's more gradual six-point increase—it did quote his top aide William Apgar, who helped craft the 2000 policy, saying: "It was a mistake." Apgar, who now teaches at Harvard, conceded, "In hindsight, I would have done it differently."

But raising the affordable-housing goals was only half the Cuomo story.

The HUD secretary is also required to produce voluminous rules that govern how the GSEs meet those goals, and the 187-page rules Cuomo issued opened the door to abuse.

The rules explicitly rejected the idea of imposing any new reporting requirements on the GSEs. In other words, HUD wanted Fannie and Freddie to buy risky loans, but the department didn't want to hear just how risky they were.

HUD conceded in the rules that many consumer groups had urged it to insist that the GSEs provide "loan-level data" revealing how many of their loans contained high interest rates, prepayment penalties, or other requirements that presaged bad loans.

Indeed, in March 2000, HUD had acknowledged that the new goal-driven pressure on the GSEs might "warrant increased monitoring and additional reporting." But when the final rules were adopted in October, that momentary caution had been abandoned: "HUD is not establishing any requirements for additional data to carry out this rule." The report explained that the GSEs "objected" to information mandates "related to their purchases of high-cost mortgages," so HUD decided against imposing "an undue additional burden." HUD would have no way of telling how abusive the low-income mortgages it was mandating might be.

Reporting from the GSEs to HUD "does not provide the details . . . [for] effective monitoring of their subprime activity," warned Allen Fishbein in a housing journal two years after the rules were published. Fishbein, who was the senior advisor at HUD for GSE oversight under Cuomo and is now general counsel at the Center for Community Change, said that HUD "should have the necessary information" to determine if the GSEs were purchasing "loans with predatory features," but that it did not.

In a Voice interview, Fishbein, who was reluctant to say a critical word about the regulations he and Cuomo developed, did acknowledge that "it would have been a beneficial thing" to have required such data from the GSEs in the 2000 rule-making, though he contended that HUD has "the general authority to collect it" without a rule-making.

"I certainly would have favored more data in hindsight," he said. But the failure to include reporting requirements that many consumer groups championed at the time was an invitation then—and not just in retrospect—for the GSEs to hide bad loans. Fishbein prefers to blame the lack of verification on the Bush administration, but when Cuomo issued his rules barely a week before the 2000 election, he failed to put any data demands in place that would have alerted the next administration, regardless of who it was, to any risks in the new GSE portfolio. In fact, Bush's HUD did institute some reporting requirements in 2004, but then never revealed much of what was learned.

But Cuomo wasn't only stifling data that HUD could use to keep the GSEs out of trouble. He also went against his own recommendation—in a report issued jointly with the Treasury Department a few months earlier—that called for a prohibition against the GSEs purchasing loans "with high costs and/or predatory features." Instead, Cuomo decided without explanation to adopt rules that prohibited nothing.

Consumer groups then contended that if HUD wasn't going to bar bad loans, it should at least penalize the GSEs for every one they made. Cuomo declined to do that as well, instead declaring that loans with specific odious terms would not be counted against the goals. His allies have pointed to this refusal as evidence of his toughness, but Cuomo couldn't very well reward Fannie and Freddie for purchasing bad loans. And the absence of any reporting requirements made it virtually impossible to figure out which loans shouldn't be credited anyway.

Cuomo also adopted Fannie and Freddie's standards of what a bad loan was, almost verbatim. For example, HUD accepted Fannie's many caveats on prepayment penalties—a predatory practice long condemned by housing advocates. The final rules allowed the GSEs to take goal credit on some loans that carried these penalties, even though these sky-high charges often either bound borrowers to bad mortgages or cost them dearly to climb out.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Fannie conceded in 2005 that 10 percent of its loans had such prepayment penalties. HUD's next rulemaking, in 2004, freely acknowledged that "certain practices were not enumerated in the regulations adopted in 2000," including certain kinds of prepayment penalties, and that they "often lock borrowers into disadvantageous loan products." But once again, HUD did nothing about those practices.

While fashioning these final rules, Cuomo wrestled with the octopus-like reach of Fannie and Freddie, which spend tens of millions each year on lobbying firms. The GSEs hired 88 lobbying firms over six years, three of which were friendly enough with Cuomo to give to his campaign committee later.

Just a look at the New Yorkers tied to the GSEs must have impressed Cuomo, who, after all, would soon return to New York politics. Harold Ickes, the former Clinton chief of staff and a Democratic power broker in this state, was on the Freddie board. Tom Downey, the former New York congressman who would later donate $21,894 to Cuomo, was a Fannie lobbyist. And Al D'Amato, the former banking committee chair who'd shepherded Cuomo's appointment through the Republican Senate, was a Fannie consultant.

But Cuomo was closer to the GSEs' most formidable opponents—namely, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), regarded as the most influential private real-estate finance lobby in Washington, and the upstart FM Watch, a new coalition of heavyweights from Chase to AIG. Both of these groups wanted Cuomo to put as much affordable-housing pressure on the GSEs as he could, and they said so in their releases and newsletters. They opposed what they called Fannie and Freddie's profit-driven "mission creep," which they saw as a publicly subsidized invasion of their high-end mortgage market. Their goal was the same as Cuomo's: to push Fannie and Freddie deeper into low-end mortgages, consistent with the mission statement in their charters.

Two of Cuomo's aides who had also worked for his father, Howard Glaser and Todd Howe, left HUD to take top jobs at the association in the middle of the GSE rule-making (the MBA parted company with both once Andrew was out of HUD). In 2000, a year after Howe joined the association, he described how he had helped build a grassroots MBA effort to pressure Congress and others into supporting HUD in what he described as the "battle" being "waged against Fannie Mae." Glaser's Harvard alumni biography says he "played a key role in negotiating a multi-billion-dollar increase in GSE affordable-housing goals." He and Howe—who insist they had "no contact" with Cuomo on the MBA's behalf—have given $3,000 to Cuomo in recent years.

The MBA also retained Brad Johnson, another ex–Mario Cuomo aide described as his "eyes and ears" in Washington, to lobby HUD while Andrew was secretary. Three other long-term HUD staffers who worked there under Cuomo—including the lawyer who was the contact person listed on the GSE rules—also ended up at the MBA or one of its lobbying firms. Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide who's become the face of the subprime scandal, was at one point the MBA's president and a member of its executive committee throughout Cuomo's HUD tenure. He and other MBA leaders became Cuomo donors, with Mozilo donating $1,000 twice—in 2002 and 2006.

Describing HUD as "the court of last resort" and "a key ally," MBA president Kit Sumner hailed Cuomo shortly after the announcement of the GSE goals at the organization's annual convention, which usually draws 6,000 lenders and brokers. Cuomo spoke at the convention every year during his tenure, appeared there as recently as 2004, and was listed on the agenda for 2005, though the MBA says he didn't attend. His father was a paid convention speaker in 2004 as well. Cuomo was regarded as such a friend of the MBA that National People's Action, a Chicago-based housing group, staged protests unrelated to the GSEs at the MBA, HUD, and Cuomo's home in McLean, Virginia. The group's spokesman declared: "We know that the MBA has a lot of pull with Andrew Cuomo, and we tried to convince them to back off. MBA said they are fully committed to HUD."

FM Watch's lobbyists during the Cuomo years at HUD included Tony Podesta, the brother of Clinton's chief of staff, and the law firm Akin Gump, where Cuomo has so many allies that his campaign committee has collected $67,550 in contributions there since he formed it in early 2001. Joel Jankowsky, head of the Akin lobbying group that represented this single-issue group, gave $7,500 to Cuomo—most of it within weeks after the formation of Andrew's committee in 2001. Jankowsky is a close personal friend of Dan Glickman, who joined Akin when he stepped down as agriculture secretary just as Cuomo left HUD in 2001. Glickman's wife Rhoda was Cuomo's deputy chief of staff, and the two Glickmans donated $10,500 to Cuomo. They also covered $23,900 of their own expenses traveling and fundraising for the campaign, which listed that as an in-kind contribution.

These groups clearly had Cuomo's ear, but he was also being pushed to commit the GSEs to more affordable and, in some cases, riskier loans by consumer organizations—groups like ACORN, which has considerable clout in New York elections. The housing advocates were happy with Cuomo's goal-setting at HUD, but the lax reporting requirements and predatory-lending loopholes suggest who was actually driving his agenda. The MBA and FM Watch didn't care about these issues; advocates did. When the final rules were announced, most of the consumer groups said little about these loopholes, but Bruce Marks, CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation, criticized the tepid enforcement: "What you're seeing is Fannie and Freddie flexing their muscle," he observed. "They have more money than God, and they use it."

Cuomo wouldn't answer Voice questions for this piece, but he was briefed on every issue raised in it and discussed his responses with Glaser, who replied in both interviews and e-mails. Glaser insisted that raising the GSE goals "was a good thing then and now," contending that "no one ever criticized Cuomo for not taking on the fight at HUD" and blaming "the Bush team that never even tried" for the mistakes that have led to the current debacle.

He dismissed the failure to include any reporting requirements in the rules by confusing it with a parallel path that Cuomo took in his final two years—an eventually successful effort to get the GSEs to supply HUD with data on the terms of 10 million loans from their automated underwriting (AU) system. Glaser contends that the GSE's ad hoc decision to turn over that information—which no court was even asked to order—obviated the need to put any data requirements in a binding rule. It's odd that Glaser makes that argument now, since Cuomo never did so when he was making the rules, and when he went on for pages about whether or not to require loan data. In fact, Cuomo's handling of the AU data itself has long been a sore spot. Fishbein's 2002 article noted that HUD completed its review of the data in 2000, but "inexplicably has yet to release the results." (Fishbein says he doesn't know if this was Cuomo's fault.)

Glaser argues that "mortgage bankers thought Cuomo was the toughest secretary they had ever known," especially Mozilo. But Cuomo was celebrated in issue after issue of the MBA's weekly publication, Real Estate Finance Today, and his MBA alliance went well beyond the GSEs—in particular, the steps he took to reshape the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees millions of mortgages. These actions, too, sought to maximize homeownership—this time by opening the FHA's door to borrowers unable to qualify in the past, a lofty goal that has also helped spur an FHA delinquency rate that exceeds its subprime competitors. The MBA cheered each of these Cuomo decisions—dramatically raising the limits on the size of FHA loans, slicing the down-payment requirement to 3 percent, and cutting the agency's insurance-premium costs virtually in half. Cuomo even supported down-payment and closing-cost assistance programs that allowed FHA borrowers to buy a home without spending a cent of their own money up front.

To the MBA, bigger FHA guarantees on the loans that MBA members granted, combined with easier terms, was a recipe for greater profits. That's why Cuomo announced the insurance cut at their convention shortly before he left office. And that's why the front page of the MBA paper was headlined "MBA Welcomes New FHA Ceiling" when he raised the loan limits, eventually nearly doubling them to $235,000. His decision to grant such large FHA mortgages was, as the GSEs pointed out, in stark contrast with his efforts to drive them into the affordable market. Indeed, it was GSE opposition to the new FHA ceilings that sparked the firefights between them and the Cuomo/MBA combine. At first, the Bush administration echoed Cuomo's FHA policies, but when the crisis hit, it began condemning down-payment assistance and urging a sliding, risk-based scale of insurance premiums.

Cuomo's fellow attorney generals in Illinois, California, and Massachusetts have filed lawsuits against Countrywide and other mortgage companies in the current crisis. And those lawsuits are aimed in part at the sucker punch called "yield-spread premium" that was thrown at millions of households who got mortgages from brokers. Brokers have taken over the origination market in recent years by aggressively advertising, and they decide which lenders get the business.

Cuomo hasn't sued anybody over these outrageous payments to brokers—which are based on the "spread" between the high interest rate that brokers persuade unwary borrowers to accept and the par or going rate they would ordinarily have to pay. If Cuomo did sue, it might make for an awkward moment or two in court, since it was Cuomo who issued a rule in 1999 that dozens of federal courts have since found legalized the yield-spread premiums. He was the first HUD secretary to say they were "not illegal per se," nullifying most of the 150 class-action lawsuits against them filed across the country.

There are certainly those who believe that YSPs are at the heart of the crisis. Senator Chris Dodd, the chair of the banking committee, is trying to ban them, prodded by the fact that up to 90 percent of subprime mortgages quietly triggered these lucrative payments. When the Federal Reserve recently considered barring them and then backed off, a Times editorial charged that it had "balked on banning the practice whereby brokers maximize their commissions by signing up borrowers for the most expensive loan possible, even when the borrower qualifies for a cheaper." The Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, accused Countrywide of structuring their deals with brokers "in a manner that virtually guaranteed" that they were "more concerned with getting the highest YSP possible than getting their borrowers the best loan possible," oblivious to "the possible fraud that this financial incentive would motivate."

Actually, no one has described what's wrong with YSPs better than Andrew Cuomo himself. In his first year as HUD secretary, when his earliest proposal to reform YSPs attracted a Times story, he said: "Too often consumers think the brokers are working for them. In reality, they are working against them." Cuomo's proposed rules that year did not go so far as to prohibit YSPs, but they did require brokers to enter into a written contract with borrowers; the brokers had to check one of three boxes, revealing whether they represented borrowers only or were receiving lender fees. Then they had to disclose the size of the fees, which usually far exceeded what the borrowers were paying.

Cuomo said the point was "to discourage practices that give financial incentives to mortgage brokers that offer higher-priced loans than what are generally available in the marketplace." The MBA, which includes brokers and other industry organizations, got Congressional leaders to oppose it, and Cuomo retreated. A year and a half later, Cuomo adopted a new rule that did the opposite of his first proposal. "The Lending Industry Welcomes Policy Clarification" was the subhead on the MBA's cover story. Cuomo's 1999 rule, issued under pressure from Congress to come up with a policy statement one way or the other because of all the lawsuits, found that YSPs were legal if "reasonably related to the value of the goods" actually furnished or the services "actually performed" by brokers. The Cuomo rule-making also stated that "HUD does not view the name of the payment as the appropriate issue," even though calling something a premium based on a "yield" and a "spread" pretty much destroys any notion that the payment is tied to a good or a service.

Experts point out that borrowers usually have no idea that such a thing exists. In fact, Harvard law professor Howell Jackson discovered that the HUD booklet on settlement costs, issued for distribution to borrowers on Cuomo's watch, never mentions YSPs or how they are financed. "You may wish to ask about the fees that the mortgage broker will receive for its services" is as close as the booklet gets. "Critically absent," concludes Jackson, "is disclosure of the fact that the borrower finances the cost of YSPs through higher monthly mortgage payments." In 1997, Cuomo's proposed rule said that "a consensus" on only one point emerged from the negotiations with the department's broadly based advisory group, namely that "a rule should require that mortgage brokers inform borrowers of the role that they are serving early enough in the transaction to allow the consumer to shop for alternatives." Cuomo's final rule, much like the GSE edict, concluded: "This statement does not mandate disclosures beyond those currently required."

Glaser acknowledged that YSPs are a big cause of the crisis, though he pointedly insisted that they were "not the biggest," and he blamed them on Bush. He pointed out that Mel Martinez issued a YSP rule in late 2001, and claimed that he did so because Cuomo's ruling permitted class-action lawsuits. In fact, courts around the country had denied class-action certifications based on Cuomo's ruling, but a circuit court in Alabama decided that Cuomo's regulations were "ambiguous," which is why Martinez then issued what he called a "clarification" of the Cuomo regulations. But as a San Francisco circuit court found shortly thereafter, the Martinez clarification essentially "reiterated" Cuomo's position and "carries forward the same principles." A dissenting member of the same California panel deplored Cuomo's ruling and said "the phrase 'yield spread premium' " was a "way of avoiding calling a kickback a kickback."

The sad fact is that Cuomo's surrender on YSPs can't be excused as an unfortunate consequence of well-motivated policy, as his defenders have argued regarding his FHA and GSE actions. He has no cover for this one; it exposes him as an agent of special interests. And looking at his GSE and FHA policies through the lens of his retreat on these payoffs (which even Glaser, in a marked change from his MBA days, now condemns) suggests a pattern of compromised judgments.

With Martinez, who was hailed at a $250,000 fundraiser co-chaired by superlobbyist felon Jack Abramoff right after he stepped down as secretary, and Jackson, who is an FBI target now, following him at HUD, Cuomo was, in some respects, the last chance that borrowers had before the crisis hit. The grand ambitions unleashed when he orchestrated his father's win at such an early age propelled him to HUD's helm at a similarly early age, and convinced him to run for governor before he was ready. He seems more comfortable at 50 in the state attorney general's office than he has ever appeared in his public life, but the country will be living with his HUD mistakes, ill- or well-intended, for a long time to come.

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

Commentary by Kevin Hassett

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: 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 said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

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.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

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.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. 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.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Obama Sends His Kids to Private Schools

while local kids rot in shitty public schools.

From Sandra Tsing Loh via the New York Times:

Here’s the thing: I do not know why Barack and Michelle Obama cannot send their children to a nice public school in Hyde Park. You understand that I am a bit unstable this election season (I voted for Hillary) and I do my research by erratically Googling from home. And all I know about Hyde Park — and, readers, I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong — is that even though real estate prices seem high, the brave little public schools in its ZIP code seem to be flailing. Their scores on www.greatschools.net are largely 2’s and 4’s (on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best). When you read the tea leaves as manically as I do, those low numbers suggest that few children of educated, middle-class children are attending the local schools. Rather, they’ve withdrawn, with nary a ripple, into their whispery private enclaves.

Let us not even touch the term “community organizer,” so buffeted about, by both sides, like a balloon at a rock concert. Let us just say that if Mr. and Mrs. Obama — a dynamic, Harvard-educated couple — had chosen public over private school, they could have lifted up not just their one local public school, but a family of schools. First, given the social pressure (or the social persuasion of wanting to belong to the cool club), more educated, affluent families would tip back into the public school fold. And second, the presence of educated type-A parents with too much time on their hands ensures that schools are held, daily, to high standards.

But the significance of educated families opting in to their local public schools goes deeper than that. Research done by Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, indicates that poor children benefit hugely by mixing, daily, with middle-class children (particularly those from families who value education). Conversely, as long as the deleterious effects of poverty, like rampant absenteeism and serious health issues, do not overwhelm the school culture, middle-class children suffer no ill effects. Furthermore, studies have shown that new immigrant children learn English faster and master the complex linguistic skills they need to succeed on standardized tests when they are in classrooms with native English speakers. Sadly, because of the widespread flight of higher-minded families, ethnic segregation (not to mention class segregation) in public schools today is so extreme that only one in five immigrant children will have even one native English-speaking friend.

So it is with huge grief-filled disappointment that I discovered that the Obamas send their children to the University of Chicago Laboratory School (by 5th grade, tuition equals $20,286 a year). The school’s Web site quotes all that ridiculous John Dewey nonsense about developing character while, of course, isolating your children from the poor. A pox on them and, while we’re at it, a pox on John Dewey! I’m sick to death of those inspirational Dewey quotes littering the Web sites of $20,000-plus-a-year private schools, all those gentle duo-tone-photographed murmurings about “building critical thinking and fostering democratic citizenship” in their cherished students, living large on their $20,000-a-year island.

Meanwhile, Joseph Biden, the Amtrak senator, standing up boldly for the right to be a Roman Catholic, appears to have sent all three children to the lovely looking Archmere Academy in Delaware. Archmere’s Web site notes some public school districts allow Archmere students to use public school buses. Well, isn’t that great — your tax dollars at work in the great state of Delaware because with $18,000 a year in tuition, they can’t afford their own buses.
Then again, a spot of happy news for the Democrats: not only did John McCain’s four children attend elite private schools in Arizona, but collective donations to their children’s private schools between 2001 and 2006, totaled $500,000.

And yes, I know I appear to be ranting on like a pit bull without lipstick, which brings me to the final nail in the coffin in this sorry election year. As a Democrat I am horrified that Sarah Palin is the one who snagged the deeply profound — and absolutely ignored by professional smart people — emotional real estate of “P.T.A. mother.” I too am, in fact, not just “my kids’ mom” but their Title I Los Angeles public school P.T.A. secretary. This unheard female howl is, for better or worse, what Ms. Palin has set out to tap into; it is real, and I am sick that we’ve let the Republicans charge this ground.

Sarah Palin’s children went to what looks like a humble little public school: Iditarod Elementary on Wasilla Fishhook Road. The school’s score on www.greatschools.net is a 4. That’s a lot of street cred, for a gun-totin’, snow-mobilin’ creationist-lovin’ lady.

Oh, I’m such a depressed, Democrat P.T.A. mother