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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sr K who wrote (121040)	9/18/2012 12:35:22 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

YOu are looking at the tree, not the forest. The point is that if you asked Obama if he could take that choice phrasing back, he'd probably say yes. For everyone to focus on the silly season of non-issues like verbal gaffes is typical and stupid. We have bigger issues to worry about. These guys are human and they sometimes don't choose their words optimally. On a more interesting and bigger issue, here's more proof of what I've been telling you all along. Our gov't hasn't really made any money on bailing out the banks. It's all been a cost shifting game to make it look like they made money, but when you take into account the less visible costs, the bailouts were staggeringly expensive. By some estimates, the American people are out trillions of dollars. So I always laugh when folks post articles saying the Fed or Treasury made some money on the sale of some securities they bought as part of the bailouts. It's very misinformed and disingenuous to ignore all the costs that should also be taken into account. --------------- GSEs Remain Backdoor Bailouts for Banks By Barry Ritholtz - September 18th, 2012, 7:07AM Reuters is reporting that: “Fannie Mae agreed to pay Bank of America Corp about 20 percent more than it was contractually obligated to last year in order to transfer the servicing of troubled loans to another firm, a report by a watchdog found. In a report to be issued on Tuesday, the inspector general for the Federal Housing Finance Agency urges the regulator to ensure Fannie Mae applies more scrutiny to the pricing of such transactions and possibly revise its contracts with mortgage servicers.” The entire backdrop to this transaction is problematic. An FHFA official “wondered whether Fannie Mae squeezed Bank of America hard enough on price considering the bank was benefiting by “getting this stuff off their books.” Making this even more problematic, Fannie Mae came up with the valuation by relying on a single contractor to come up with prices for most of the transactions.” In other words, this was a no bid deal that was based on one person’s opinion, no market pricing mechanism, and ended up a sweetheart deal for BofA. Here’s the thing: This was no accident — it was by design. Starting with Bush, and continuing with Obama, the GSE takeover was an easy way to continue funneling money to banks with minimal scrutiny. This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now, as the laundry list of previous posts (below) shows. Think about that the next time someone tells you how much money Treasury has made on the bailouts.