The Bankers Did It!
An amazing 3.5 million people have watched this You Tube Video of our tax dollars in action. It’s been deliberately edited for length and to highlight what is now characterized as a partisan position, rather than salient historical evidence of Congressional chicanery. You decide. I decided long ago that, although an enormous amount of bad behavior occurred in the financial industry, without being fed worthless mortgage assets encouraged by the folks you see on the tape (and President Clinton) – accompanied by a deliberate relaxation in regulatory oversight – we might have just had a normal recession.
The guy who Congressman Meeks is yelling at on the tape is from (oh-fay-oh) the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, a division of HUD. It’s been succeeded by FHFA, the Federal Housing Finance Agency that publishes the Housing Price Index, using data from Fannie and Freddie. He was catching hell because his agency was responsible for regulation of the Government Sponsored Entities (GSE’s) and he was apparently trying to warn about the impending mortgage crisis. I apologize for not having checked on the context in which this hearing took place; my purpose here is to make sure this video is available on this site for those not already familiar with it. We can revisit the Franklin Raines (Fannie Mae CEO) scandal some other time, if necessary, and maybe dig into how Fannie’s practices came to be called into public question. Enjoy.
{video}httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
