Yesterday director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Bloomberg News columnist Kevin Hasset reported at Bloomberg.com that Democrats are the ones who created the current financial crisis that we find ourselves in as a nation. According to his commentary, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “exploded” and injured many bystanders (some fatally). “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.”
Hassett reports that as of the end of June 2008, “Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments.” He continues (emphasis mine).
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.
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.
Hassett suggests that many Democrats may have opposed this bill due to the massive financial contributions they received from Fannie and Freddie. He continues Read More…
Posted under Barack Obama, John McCain, Politics
