Back in the early '90's, Newt was having a cozy threesome with Fannie and Freddie, according to a summary of his "deep ties" in the New York Times today.
Mr. Gingrich has faced many questions recently about the more than $1.6 million in consulting fees he got from Freddie Mac since leaving Congress in 1999. But part of the relationship started years earlier, as records and interviews show that Mr. Gingrich, as House leader in the 1990s, aligned himself with Freddie and Fannie on a number of key issues — defending them in Congress against political attacks, joining with them on housing projects and seeing top aides go work for them.
While Mr. Gingrich has minimized his past connections to the two closely related companies on the campaign trail, his Congressional record shows that his political and financial ties to the firms run deeper and farther back than he has acknowledged publicly and, in fact, set the stage for the lucrative consulting work that followed. ...NYT
In fact, the "government-backed housing giants" were kicking around in bed with a bunch of Republican lawmakers when the Republican party controlled Congress. Blowing them off as the Democrats' allies doesn't really work.
“Whenever you could get Republicans who supported you, it was important, and the more prominent the Republican, the better,” said William Maloni, a senior vice president at Fannie Mae until 2004. “Newt would have been important.” ...NYT
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Meanwhile, Freddie Mac was playing the Wall Street game. They placed financial bets against homeowners in order to make money. Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) that oversees Freddie Mac, has been on the hot seat.
Saying he is "completely puzzled by the notion that there was something immoral that went on here," the man at the top of the agency that regulates Freddie Mac has explained why he believes the taxpayer-owned mortgage company did nothing wrong when one of its arms, as NPR and ProPublica have reported, "placed multibillion-dollar bets against American homeowners being able to refinance to cheaper mortgages."
Edward DeMarco told Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep in an interview broadcast on today's show that Freddie Mac's actions were "in the class of ordinary business transactions." The "reverse floaters" in Freddie Mac's investment portfolio, which as NPR has reported "brought in more money for Freddie Mac when homeowners in higher interest-rate loans were unable to qualify for a refinancing," did not affect the agency's efforts to stabilize the mortgage market, DeMarco said.
Instead, DeMarco characterized the investments as part of Freddie Mac's effort to make sure it doesn't lose money. And he said one of his major responsibilities, is to "make sure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac undertake activities that don't cause further losses to the American taxpayer." ...NPR, Morning Edition___
Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates. ...Pro Publica
Don't forget: Fannie and Freddie were paying Newt Gingrich out of those ill-gotten gains. $25,000 a month.
Who can we count on to oversee the regulators? A Republican Congress? Silly thought.
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Okay, so why doesn't the president fire Edward DeMarco?
"You can't fire an 'acting,'" has been the response. An acting director of an agency has to be replaced by a real director. Is Congress about to approve an Obama nomination for a new director of FHFA?
More than a dozen California Democrats wrote to President Barack Obama, asking him to replace DeMarco with a permanent recess appointment.
Congressman Dennis Cardoza of Modesto says the mortgage agencies’ acting director “simply doesn’t get it.” Cardoza says that in meetings with DeMarco, lawmakers asked whether he’d ever even met a borrower who’d been foreclosed on. He hadn’t.
"You’d think that someone in his position would at least try to understand the human side of it," Cardoza said, "rather than just the green eyeshade side of it."
House Democrat Zoe Lofgren of San Jose says that, in a fall meeting with DeMarco, lawmakers offered their proposal to help mortgage borrowers whose homes are worth less than they owe. She says DeMarco asked for 10 days to review the idea.
"At the end of January, instead of October, we got an answer," Lofgren said, "and it’s clear from the answer he hadn’t even looked at it. So he took several months to not do his job." She says it's nothing personal, but DeMarco is a "career civil servant who is not apparently capable of taking the bold action that is necessary to rescue the economy."
Cardoza says that if the president can’t muster enough Senate votes to approve a permanent head of the agency, he needs to replace DeMarco and “put somebody with a pulse” in that position. ...KPCC
