Category Archives: Fannie Mae
Ben Bernanke’s Money
What good is quantitative easing if Ben Bernanke can’t get a loan? The former Fed chairman confided last week that he was unable to refinance his $850,000 home mortgage. It’s true he’s out of a job but ex-government swells are never out of the money. Bernanke is still making the stuff from thin air (or hot air) by cranking out speeches at more than $200,000 a pop.
Helicopter Ben Bernanke
IBD notes that even Barney Frank now lays some blame on the government for the 2008 banking crisis. It forced banks to lend to risky home buyers and now Dodd Frank is overcorrecting by putting the clamps on the banking industry. Banks have been forced to close branches to pay penalties. They’re sitting on piles of free money but they’re reluctant to lend, even to Helicopter Ben.
In that same speech he also discussed how the government can always avoid deflation by printing more dollars and referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, about using a helicopter drop of money to fight deflation. Since then, Bernanke has had the nickname of “Helicopter Ben.”
Location Location
U.S. taxpayers live in a bad neighborhood. Now the good neighbor, FHA, may be headed for a bail-out. FHA is $16 billion in the hole – we’re $16 trillion in the hole. How does that work?
Game Plan
After three years of anger over ObamaCare and the housing crisis, the Republican nomination is boiling down to RomneyCare vs The Freddie Mac water boy. Here’s Krauthammer.
Bye Bye, Barney
We won’t have Barney Frank to kick around any more and vice versa – here’s Dana Milbank on Barney the Bully.
This was inspired by one of my favorite Don Wright cartoons. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a link to it. The cartoon featured a Vietnamese family standing in a landscape of bomb craters waving thanks to American jets as they flew away at the end of the war.
I’ve always considered Barney Frank just as much a friend to the poor as we were to the Vietnamese.
Newt Loot
As surprise front-runner Newt Gingrich begins unpacking his baggage in Iowa the first item up for inspection is his $1.8 million dollar punched ticket on the Freddie Mac gravy train.
The figures in the chart for Franklin Raines and James Johnson are from IBD. Gorelick’s $26 mil came from CNSnews.
