>>>regulate the derivatives market. ... leveraged action ... wasn't going to be allowed in the future from Wall Street.<<<
Hmmmm. I am not sure if I posted the op-ed below on Saturday. Regardless it is worth the bandwidth to repost. Mr. Baker, a hedge fund lobbyist seems to have made a small career warning that Fannie/Freddie were imploding. Yet we sold about $350 billion of their paper to the Chinese - and that is just for starters. FNE/FRE got the rules changed to be allowed to purchase subprime. All of a sudden the government....on a whim...decided to make an implicit guarantee explicit. Sounds to me like our government was effectively selling credit default swaps and the Chinese exercised their puts. In the end, isn't all of the bad debt in some way tied to real estate. Wasn't it the government through Greenspan's printing, low qualification standards and "the ownership society" responsible?? One wonders why the government intervenes when crude prices got too high but looked the other way when housing became unaffordable. See especially the highlights below:
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Shouting 'Fannie!' in a Crowded Congress
Advice from the man who foresaw the GSE collapse.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Richard Baker says that he's not in the business of advising presidential candidates. That's too bad. The candidates and the American taxpayer might be in a better place if he were.
Mr. Baker, of course, is the former Louisiana Republican who spent nearly a decade crying in the wilderness . . . er, Congress . . . that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ticking time bombs. Earlier this year he was named CEO of Managed Funds Association, a lobbying firm that represents the hedge-fund industry. And amid the financial carnage, he is somewhat bemused to hear people say they are shocked, shocked to learn that someone had predicted it all.
"Everyone writes as though there were just one hearing or one piece of legislation," says Mr. Baker. "I think I must have had eight bills and maybe 40 hearings going back to 1996."
Mr. Baker's interest in Fan and Fred grew out of the savings-and-loan debacle. "My background was in real estate and home building," he says. "At the time I ran for Congress, we were dealing with the S&L problem -- lax lending standards, and the American taxpayer on the hook for risks other people were taking. I saw how destructive that was to the personal wealth and businesses of many of my friends and associates. And when I looked into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I saw the same problems -- only a lot bigger and a lot more dangerous."
Mr. Baker declines to comment on any of the proposals put forward by either Barack Obama or John McCain. But he does outline some general principles that should have some resonance with each of the candidates. Sen. Obama, for example, might like Mr. Baker's idea of returning the mission of affordable housing to a revitalized Department of Housing and Urban Development (working with the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs).
There are several advantages to such a reform. First, the risk to the financial sector would be removed. Second, the congressionally protected monopoly that Fan and Fred exploited would be gone -- and with that the obscene salaries enjoyed by its top executives. Finally, HUD might actually get more housing built for low-income Americans, as opposed to the $200,000 to $300,000 loans that Mr. Baker says characterized a good chunk of Fan and Fred's portfolios.
For Sen. McCain, Mr. Baker's distinctions between deregulation of the private sector and the lack of oversight for a federally backed enterprise might help him push back on the Democratic talking point that the whole mess was caused by GOP-inspired financial deregulation.
"My starting principle is this," says Mr. Baker. "The closer an enterprise is to the taxpayer's wallet, the more congressional oversight it requires. The further away you get from that wallet, the more freedom you should give people, because they are risking their own money, not the taxpayers'."
On Capitol Hill, he notes, we had just the opposite. In terms of accountability, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, they lacked the congressional oversight that would have come had there been an explicit and acknowledged taxpayer guarantee. On the other hand, the privileged position represented by this implicit guarantee removed the discipline that market competition forces on other private enterprises.
Mr. Baker goes further. He points out that it wasn't the unregulated part of the financial markets that got us here. It was the regulated part. In his own industry, he notes, the lack of a government guarantee means folks do a lot more due diligence before they part with their money.
Today all this sounds wise -- and obvious. But back when he was sounding the alarms in Congress, it was a different story. When he made public the outrageous compensation of Fan and Fred's executives, they threatened to sue him. When he questioned Franklin Raines, the now-disgraced former head of Fannie Mae, a fellow congressman accused him of a "lynching." When he suggested Fan and Fred's paper was not solid, he was dismissed as a crank. And on one of his early reform proposals, he couldn't find a single cosponsor.
For the past few weeks, the loudest voices debating the way forward belong to those who told us these government-sponsored enterprises were safe and sound. As Messrs. Obama and McCain go into their third and final debate tomorrow night, maybe it's time to do the real maverick thing: Start looking for solutions to our Fan and Fred-induced meltdown from the fella who got it right. |
