Two things..first, url of great video of Columbia University panel with Bethany McLane, Bill Ackman, and former Fannie CEO Franklin Raines, embedded here:
https://globalreports.
And also worth reading the story by Bethany here..where she herself uses the phrase “The greatest accounting fraud ever” as one of her section headings int he article too.
But second thing is — I finally watched the rest of the video..I had watched parts earlier….it’s not short but has great quotes (later there’s Q/A and first person for Q/A is Hindes from Delaware lawsuit)
Feel free to use this quote (copy paste or turn into meme for tweeting, whatever) but here’s one I did take time to transcribe just today:
At about 59:24 minutes into this 1:07:46 video, Franklin (Frank) Raines:
“The one thing I could say — I just want to add, in terms of the
unusual nature of this and why it’s, why it causes a lot of people a
lot of concern and suspicion, is, if you look at the numbers,
essentially, Fannie Mae from its capital and its earnings since the
crisis, it’s basically earned enough to pay all of its debt. All of
the losses, [it could] paid it out of either capital or from
revenue. Which is what you’d expect. So that clearly what you had is a
concern, [among] people, that they would run out of money, that they
would have a crisis, and that’s why the government needed to come in.
“But the government had one other instance of this with AIG. Very
similar problem, AIG had a lot of assets but they weren’t in cash and
they had to pay out a lot of obligations. So the government basically
said, ‘you’ve got the assets you just don’t have the cash. We’ll make
a deal with you, get you to the end-point — we’re going to take a lot
of the company, as a result — but eventually, AIG, you’re going to be
a private company [again]. The odd thing that causes people concern,
is: Why wasn’t Fannie and Freddie given that same deal? You didn’t
have to invent a whole new deal [Bethany, listening, stifles a laugh]
Why didn’t you just have the same deal that you had with AIG, where it
was a cash flow issue?
“I mean, one little secret, that’s never been talked about, is that
all those loans that Fannie Mae has on their books –Bill [Ackman]
doesn’t like it being on the books and I disagree with him on some of
his analysis — *none* of them were pledged. None. They were all
*free and clear assets*. The Fed could have loaned **$200B Billion** to Fannie Mae
on a completely secured basis. They decided not to do that. So those
are the kinds of things that cause people questions as to ‘why did the
government do what it did?’ “
-Franklin Raines, former chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae. Who, when he
started his remarks at beginning, stated he didn’t have a horse in
this race given that he isn’t a shareholder, also he left the company
a good number of years [something like four years] before the crisis,
and given he is not part of any lawsuit against anyone on this matter,
and given that he had won all of the lawsuits that had earlier been
against him regarding the crisis.
Powerful points I haven’t seen, or seen enough explicitly in this detail..especially the 200B load could have been made totally secured but chose not to…Feel free to use (or verfy at 59:24 if you like) anyway..hope useful in the fanniegate cause..