Barney Frank, Freddie, Fannie and the Bailout

Today's Boston Herald had a synopsis of Fannie, Freddie and the crisis of bullying banks to give bad debt here.

As Winston Churchill might have put it, never before has one man done so much that was so wrong, or shafted so many on behalf of so few.

Lenders asked themselves, why should I care how shaky these borrowers are or risky the loans if a government-backed body is going to buy them up anyway?

The loans were made, the housing market bubbled, contributions from F&F flowed to Democrats like Chris Dodd and Barack Obama, and everyone was happy. Until they weren’t.

Without Freddie and Fannie’s reckless expansion, the housing bubble doesn’t happen. Without the implied promise behind F&F’s money, investment banks don’t dive into the derivatives market.

Instead, we did it Barney’s way.

Not only has Frank spent his career stopping any real reform of Fannie and Freddie, he repeatedly insisted they weren’t backed by the taxpayers. “There is no federal liability whatsoever,” Frank said in 2000.

But two weeks ago, we had to bail them out with $200 billion in our tax dollars.

Alan Greenspan, John McCain and others warned that F&F were taking on too much risk, but Frank dismissed these “overblown” fears as ideological attacks against his favorite cash cow. Even after Franklin Raines and Joe Johnson were caught red-handed mismanaging these institutions, Frank still insisted “we are not facing any kind of crisis.”...

Mr. Frank was publicly arguing for an increase in the size of their combined $1.4 trillion portfolios right up to the day they were bailed out. Even now . . . he opposes Treasury’s planned reduction in the size of the portfolios starting in 2010.”

Our markets have collapsed, we’re paying through the nose, and Barney Frank is still fighting to keep Fannie and Freddie on the dole.

Why? Because in his mind, the point of Fannie/Freddie is taxpayer-subsidized housing for low-income borrowers - no matter how bad their credit or how high the cost.

“Otherwise,” he asks, “why should they exist?”

And what about us, the responsible borrowers and hard-working taxpayers stuck with the trillion-dollar tab? In Barney’s world, that’s the only reason we exist. He spends. We pay.

This truly is Barney Frank’s bailout.