The Great Debate

Last week, I spotlighted three ominous trends in consumer banking. The last one spotlighted a brewing war “between the private bank sector and the government over who exactly controls the allocation of consumer credit in this country.”

By far, the most important front in this battle is over the future of housing finance. Today, the government is underwriting or assuming 100 percent of the credit risk on practically every new mortgage that’s originated. With regard to outstanding mortgages, the government is responsible for 100 percent of the default risk on about $6 trillion of the roughly $10 trillion market.

Thankfully, there is some real hope that a somewhat clandestine reform effort is about to commence that would start to shift a portion of this credit risk back to the private sector. The leader of this effort is the much-maligned regulator of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After Fannie and Freddie were bailed out and then taken over by the government in 2008, Edward DeMarco was named acting head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and conservator of the GSEs. He was tasked with a nearly impossible balancing act or mission:

mitigating Enterprise losses, which ultimately accrue to taxpayers; ensuring families have access to mortgages to buy a home or refinance an existing mortgage; and offering borrowers in trouble on their mortgage an opportunity to modify their loan or otherwise avoid foreclosure.

Most of the criticism that DeMarco has received to date has come from those who wish he would prioritize making mortgage refinancing or modifications easier, even if there are questions about whether some of these actions may lead to more taxpayer losses. Taxpayers have already bailed out the GSEs with more than $150 billion.

1. Crash Winners

Here’s a new entry for the lists of winners and losers that get published this time of year: The ten lawyers, bankers, consultants or accountants who reaped the most from the financial disaster of the last three years.

The poster-boy would likely be Irving Picard, a partner at the Cleveland-based international law firm of Baker & Hostetler. Picard is the court-appointed trustee responsible for recovering money for Bernie Madoff’s victims. From the sketchy clips I’ve seen, it appears that Picard and his firm have already received more than $200 million in fees for their work from the court overseeing the cases. Is that true?

Then there are the lawyers involved in bringing and defending all those multi-hundred million-dollar and billion-dollar claims against the banks that packaged and re-sold troubled mortgages and other securities. Or the accountants, lawyers and bankers sorting out the assets and liabilities in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and and other implosions.

By Jack Abramoff
The opinions expressed are his own.

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich romanced the Tea Party activists, who demand that the corrupt swamp of Washington be drained. His intrepid spokesman, R.C. Hammond, had a more arduous task: convincing the world that the former Speaker was not swimming in that same swamp. As facts emerged revealing that Gingrich took almost $2 million in “consulting” fees from the beleaguered Freddie Mac, Hammond delivered proof that the Gingrich operation was master of the inside-the-Washington-beltway game. Spinning Gingrich’s perfidious (yet legal) trip through the infamous revolving door to post public service riches, Hammond posited that taking millions in consulting fees was actually a positive: since Newt now understood “why the system is broken,” he now knew “how it could be fixed.” In other words, now that he had participated in legal corruption, he was more qualified to be our President.

By that metric, I should be announcing my cabinet choices any day now. After all, in 2004, my lobbying activities became the basis for the biggest corruption scandal to hit Washington since Watergate. Gingrich’s candidacy may or may not survive these revelations, but there is a bigger issue to consider than whether this late-night-talk show hosts’ dream politician makes it to the Oval Office.

America is sick of its political leaders raking in millions of dollars in fees from special interests. At a time when the average American can barely afford enough gasoline to get to work, our politicians are converting their elected positions into major paydays. Newt is not the first and won’t be the last to do this. He just has the bad luck to be surging in the polls. But the problem with this latest round of “shoot the leading Republican candidate” is that it deflects attention from the need to change the system. Every time one of these “gotcha” attacks becomes personal, it loses its capacity to engender real reform.

By Maureen Tkacik
The opinions expressed are her own.

Also read part one of this series, How Ed DeMarco finally cried fraud.

A big clue something had become dysfunctional at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came in the first week of 2011, when the government mortgage market makers announced the terms of a settlement agreement they’d reached with Bank of America, and were immediately pilloried for extending the bank another “backdoor bailout” by the likes of Maxine Waters and the American Enterprise Institute.

By the end of January an internal investigation had convened, all other settlement negotiations had been suspended, and Edward J. DeMarco, the acting Fannie/Freddie overseer pending the confirmation of his replacement, found himself suddenly faced with the challenge of replacing himself as congressional Republicans vowed to stonewall Obama’s pick. Part one of this series traced DeMarco’s unlikely conversion in 2011 from coddler of banks to unyielding litigator of bank fraud. It’s a rare shift in Washington, where “corruption” is a process that’s practically synonymous with “aging.” What’s often forgotten when bureaucrats fail as spectacularly as they have at Fannie and Freddie is the critical roles played by cluelessness, incuriosity, faulty reasoning and fraudulent economic logic as well.

Consider what the inspector general learned about the corporate procedures for pursuing “putback” claims in place at Freddie Mac. While purchase contracts entitle the GSEs to force banks to buy back any delinquent loan in which it finds evidence of fraud, Freddie restricted examiners to screening only mortgages which had defaulted within two years of origination, a tiny sliver of total foreclosures comprising less than one-tenth of defaults from the years 2004 to 2007—the vintage of the Countrywide loans. When one of DeMarco’s deputies noticed this apparent oversight and began warning executives that “Freddie could passively be absorbing billions of dollars of losses” merely by refusing to glance at 90% of their files, the enterprise … chose to absorb the losses, repeatedly resorting to a boilerplate argument justifying the two-year policy holding that:

By Maureen Tkacik
The opinions expressed are her own.

Read part two of this series: Everyone’s housing market profits were fictitious.

It took three years, but Fannie/Freddie Conservator Ed DeMarco is starting to channel his inner Irving Picard by acknowledging that among root causes of the financial crisis is fraud, and lots of it.

Trying to parse the madness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past few years has given me a new appreciation for Bernie Madoff. Bernie might not have left much for his victims, but at least they finally got a straight answer about what he’d been doing with their money all those years, and a sensible legal framework for recovering and winding down all that might be left.

By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The opinions expressed are his own.

America is on a path to fiscal disaster.  The skyrocketing national debt will continue to force the Nation to make fundamental decisions about what the government will and will not do, and how to share budget resources across competing programs.  Too bad Congressional budget rules give misleading signals on the best path forward.

In spite of the impending crisis, in just the past two years Congress and the President have committed the United States government to lend directly more than a trillion dollars of student, home and other loans.  That is over a trillion dollars of new borrowing at a time when debt threatens the foundations of the U.S. economy.  More startling, the borrowing was done in the name of deficit reduction.

How could this be?

Budget law requires the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to assume that loans made directly by the government earn huge profits, with virtually no risk that such estimates could be wrong.  As a former CBO Director, it is easy for me to point out that most of the governments financial transactions are fraught with risk – the support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being the prime examples that came back to haunt the taxpayer.  So it is a paper fantasy that the federal government will surely recoup more money than it lends out.  If a bank were to use the same accounting, the Securities and Exchange Commission would charge them with overstating their earnings and throw the book at them.  Congress gets to call these phantom profits “savings.”

A year after the government's seizure of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG , not to mention the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers that sent the global financial system into a tailspin, very little has changed to prevent debt from being sliced and diced, again and again.

This is a mistake. Although there were many factors contributing to the downfall of the global financial system, the repackaging of toxic debt into esoteric financial products was at the heart of the credit crisis when it erupted in 2007.

It's easy to forget, particularly when many are focused on anniversary tick-tock accounts of the last days of Lehman Brothers, how nasty CDOs -- or worse, CDO squareds -- became so incredibly popular in the first place.

Don't blame global stock markets for being skittish. It is August, after all, a month that has spelled trouble in the past two years.

Recall that, a year ago, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started wobbling at the precipice while AIG, desperate for cash, began paying junk-like yields in the corporate bond market. A month later, all hell broke loose.

In August 2007, a shutdown in short-term lending markets forced global policy makers to rush in with a flood of liquidity to keep the lifeblood of the financial system from clotting.

– Peter Morici is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. The views expressed are his own. —

For every new president, campaign promises and inaugural idealism must give way to the hard choices that measure the mettle of their leadership.

Now Barack Obama must act pragmatically to fix the banks or the economy will sink under their weight.