Barney Frank 2009 Porker Of The Year

by Admin on February 5, 2010

Barney Frank 2009 Porker of the Year With President Barack Obama As The ‘Write In’ Favorite

Chairman Frank garnered the lion’s share of the votes as a result of his relentless and garrulous role in the failure of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage government-sponsored enterprises (GSE), which were taken into government conservatorship in September of 2008 after they began to collapse. The two GSEs, which own or guarantee half of the nation’s $11 trillion home mortgages, have been on life support with $112 billion in taxpayer funds since then and taxpayers could be liable for trillions in bad loans on their balance sheets. – Source: cagw.org

Among GSE defenders, Chairmen Frank is without any notable contenders. He secured their lavish franchises and fended off all efforts to confirm GSE oversight even when it has become crystal clear that GSE executives had manipulated profit statements, given themselves huge bonuses based on bogus details, and steered the companies into such a dangerous condition that they threatened the complete monetary structure. In one of his most outrageous arguments, he told The New York Times on September 11, 2003 that the GSEs were “not facing any type of financial crisis…[t]he much more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” During a 2003 committee hearing, he casually proclaimed that he didn’t want “the same type of focus on safety and soundness that we have in Office of the Comptroller from the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision. I wish to roll the dice a little bit much more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

As recent as January 22, 2010, Chairman Barney Frank made this striking declaration, Frank said that his finance committee will now endorse “abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance.” Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/business/23fannie.html