Government-Sponsored Mortgage Giant Seeks $1.8 Billion More in Bailouts
Mortgage giant Freddie Mac is seeking $1.8 billion more in bailouts from the federal government. This mortgage giant, and its sister company, Fannie Mae, are expected to ultimately receive over $400 billion in bailouts.
Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by buying up risky sub-prime mortgages and repackaging them as prime mortgages, thus creating an artificial market for junk.
Meanwhile, they paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud–$6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone–to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses. As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.
Even administration officials admit they were a “core part of what went wrong” in our financial system.
But the recent financial “reform” law signed by Obama does nothing to reform these mortgage giants. Instead, it’s 2,315 pages of payoffs for special interests. (Obama received $125,000 in contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives.)
Civil rights commissioners and economists say it contains provisions that are racially discriminatory. The so-called financial “reform” law “imposes race and gender employment quotas on the financial industry — at a time the job market is stalling and economic growth is slowing,” writes economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth in The Washington Examiner. Its “Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.” This unconstitutional requirement is the brainchild of Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the Castro-loving, left-wing ideologue who earlier praised the Los Angeles race riots that destroyed scores of Korean-owned businesses as an “uprising” against injustice. Waters once told a CEO in a public Congressional hearing, “This liberal will be all about socializing . . . .uh, uh . . . would be about, basically, taking over and the government running all of your companies.” Waters is currently facing ethics charges for her role in obtaining corporate welfare and a bailout for a bank that later defaulted on dividend payments to the Treasury Department.