Category Archives: Stimulus
Man of the People
The president celebrated his birthday in style while the stock market suffered its worst week since March 2009. Here’s an exchange between ABC’s Jake Tapper and press secretary Jay Carney over the collapsing stock market on Thursday.
More Sacred Bull
The president is sharing the sacrificial bull till the sacred cows come home. He has the Republicans where he wants em, continue building on his 24% grab of the economy or take the blame for a social security scare.
Walk the Walk
Wall Street wasn’t an innocent bystander but Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner pin the blame for the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae in their book Reckless Endangerment. They say Fannie head, James Johnson figured out how to monetize the outfit’s government backing.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.
Bump in the Road
During a speech at the Jeep plant in Toledo, Obama admitted “There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery”. According to Mark Steyn, “This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road”.
