What, no Afternoon_Delight cartoon posted right at the top? It must be slipping.

You can't look in that burning office building either. Nothing to see here.

Bullshiat posturing. Next time around, try loaning money to the people that intend to pay it back. There's plenty of things to blame directly on Bush. It absolutely pales in comparison to the things that have nothing to do with him or even his administration that get blamed on him anyway. Toss this on that pile.

What?

Chocolate is that big of a deal?

deeproy: What, no Afternoon_Delight cartoon posted right at the top? It must be slipping.

Here's one for you.

deeproy: What, no Afternoon_Delight cartoon posted right at the top? It must be slipping.

I think he got a time-out after posting in the Women's Lib thread.

If you need his input, you can simulate it by repeatedly slamming your head into a brick wall.

GoodyearPimp: Bullshiat posturing. Next time around, try loaning money to the people that intend to pay it back. There's plenty of things to blame directly on Bush. It absolutely pales in comparison to the things that have nothing to do with him or even his administration that get blamed on him anyway. Toss this on that pile.

This is totally different thant the Subprime mess. This is more of an Enron-style accounting scandal that blew up about two years ago whenre fereda auditors disallowed their accounting methods and determined that they were $5 billion or so more indebt than they were claiming. This guy is now claiming those auditors were part of a conspiracy to bring Fannie Mae down and thereby loosen the restrictions on the mortgage industry generally.

If it were any other Administration, I'd buy this guy a subscription to Tinfoil Weekly. As it is though...

GoodyearPimp: Bullshiat posturing.

See, the problem with politicizing the shiat out of the operation of the Federal gov't is that even bullshiat posturing begins to sound credible.

What in any other Administration would seem like tinfoil paranoia, in this administration seems like it just might have happened.

Raines says the Bush administration wanted to undermine confidence in the agency so it could push for tighter government controls.

Republican...you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

reveal101: Republican...you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Given that Fannie is chartered by the government and its pass-through securities enjoy an implied (but not explicit, as with Ginnie) guarantee which substantially lowers Fannie's borrowing costs, it's actually entirely reasonable for a Republican (or a Democrat) to want to tighten government controls over such an entity.

The fact is I feel bad for Raines. He didn't do anything "wrong," he just got caught up in the whole post-Enron reevaluation of financial statements. Accounting treatments which were perfectly acceptable in the past became untenable when it became clear how broadly they could be abused by bad people. The broad net of that reevaluation caught a lot of good people who didn't get the message quite quickly enough. Franklin Raines was one of those guys.

dracos31: deeproy: What, no Afternoon_Delight cartoon posted right at the top? It must be slipping.

I think he got a time-out after posting in the Women's Lib thread.

If you need his input, you can simulate it by repeatedly slamming your head into a brick wall.

Or just wait for his latest alt.

Heh. I thought that read "Sallie Mae" and was excited there for a moment.

/well, bother

Sounds like a great idea/scam on the part of the ex-CEO. If the court agrees that these documents are relevant to his defense, and the WH doesn't release them, then it's imposible for him to receive a fair trial.----- > case dismissed

And we all know the WH will never release anything.

Magorn: If it were any other Administration, I'd buy this guy a subscription to Tinfoil Weekly. As it is though...

This. Thanks for posting, saved me from typing the exact same thing.

Found this when googling:
Raines was the first OMB director in a generation to have balanced the federal budget.
how can he balance the federal budget but play dumb when it comes to his own at Fannie Mae?

lelio: how can he balance the federal budget but play dumb when it comes to his own at Fannie Mae?

Oh, that's easy. He was an expert in government accounting and in his prior job at Fannie probably became an expert in the "old" accounting of financial firms, when Fannie was mostly in the mortgage business. But by the time he got out of government and went back to Fannie it was basically a big derivatives pool. That's a whole nother kettle of fish. Math PhD's pretend to understand those things, but they don't -- the Nobelists who designed the pricing for these kinds of things went broke at Long Term Capital. A normal business/government guy like Raines, no matter how smart, would be hopelessly screwed trying to capture a balance sheet as large as Fannie's. That, frankly, is why Wall Street, the White House, Congress, the Fed (with the partial exception of Alan Greenspan until it was too late) and everyone else wanted the GSEs to shrink their balance sheets -- the cost of misunderstanding the so-called hedges plus the chances of it happening summed up to an unacceptable risk to the market. Raines was the unfortunate guy who happened to be in the CEO's spot at the time, but literally any other person on earth would have met the same fate as Raines if he had happened to be there at the time. I hold him blameless even though I think what happened had to happen.