Barney Frank (One Man Wrecking Team) [Political? You bet!]

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

TRYSAIL

America will end up with everything it wants but prosperity, and we'll be like Albania circa 1989 or the American South circa 1850. That is, the elites will ride around in Cadillacs, attending cotillions and barbecues; the niggers will pick and hoe the cotton for a sack of corn meal and a hunk of fatback; and the rest will root hog or die.

 

[DesertPirate]

As lawmakers fight to save dealers, the United Auto Workers union has been lobbying to get new GM jobs.

"We quite frankly put pressure on the White House,' " says Ron Gettelfinger, who runs the union. When GM said it wanted to build a small car in China, Gettelfinger told the White House he wanted it in the U.S.

If built here the cost will triple due to union "tax"

 

[trysail]

Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475110152189446.html

Barney Frank, Predatory Lender
Almost two-thirds of all bad mortgages in our financial system were bought by government agencies or required by government regulations.


By PETER J. WALLISON
Recent reports that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will suffer default rates of more than 20% on the 2007 and 2008 loans it guaranteed has raised questions once again about the government's role in the financial crisis and its efforts to achieve social purposes by distorting the financial system.

The FHA's function is to guarantee mortgages of low-income borrowers (the mortgages are then sold through securitizations by Ginnie Mae) and thus to take reasonable credit risks in the interests of making mortgage credit available to the nation's low-income citizens. Accordingly, the larger than normal losses that will result from the 2007 and 2008 cohort could be justified by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, as "policy"—an effort to ease the housing downturn through the application of government credit. The FHA, he argued, is buying more weak mortgages in order to help put a floor under the housing market. Eventually, the taxpayers will have to judge whether this policy was justified.

Far more interesting than the FHA's prospective losses on its 2007 and 2008 book are the agency's losses on its 2005 and 2006 guarantees, when the housing bubble was inflating at its fastest rate and there was no need for government support. FHA-backed loans during those years also have delinquency rates between 20% and 30%. These adverse results—not the result of a "policy" effort to shore up markets—pose a significant challenge to those who are trying to absolve the U.S. government of responsibility for the financial crisis.

When the crisis first arose, the left's explanation was that it was caused by corporate greed, primarily on Wall Street, and by deregulation of the financial system during the Bush administration. The implicit charge was that the financial system was flawed and required broader regulation to keep it out of trouble. As it became clear that there was no financial deregulation during the Bush administration and that the financial crisis was caused by the meltdown of almost 25 million subprime and other nonprime mortgages—almost half of all U.S. mortgages—the narrative changed. The new villains were the unregulated mortgage brokers who allegedly earned enormous fees through a new form of "predatory" lending—by putting unsuspecting home buyers into subprime mortgages when they could have afforded prime mortgages...

*****​

... When Fannie and Freddie were finally taken over by the government in 2008, more than 10 million subprime and other weak loans were either on their books or were in mortgage-backed securities they had guaranteed. An additional 4.5 million were guaranteed by the FHA and sold through Ginnie Mae before 2008, and a further 2.5 million loans were made under the rubric of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required insured banks to provide mortgage credit to home buyers who were at or below 80% of median income. Thus, almost two-thirds of all the bad mortgages in our financial system, many of which are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, were bought by government agencies or required by government regulations...

*****​

... If they were engaged in predatory lending, it was ultimately driven by the government's own requirements. The mortgages that resulted are now problem loans for the GSEs, the FHA and the big banks that were required to make them in order to burnish their CRA credentials.

The significance of the FHA's troubles is that this agency had no profit motive. Yet it dipped into the same pool of subprime and other nontraditional mortgages that the GSEs and Wall Street were fishing in. The left cannot have it both ways, blaming the private sector for subprime lending while absolving the government policies that created the demand for subprime loans. If the financial crisis was caused by subprime mortgages and predatory lending, the government's own policies made it happen.

 

[DeeZire]

Trysail - you need to show us the government regulation (signed by Barney Frank) that required mortgage brokers to falsify applications. Until you do, you will not be taken seriously.

Plus, I'm really disappointed there was no colorful graph or chart accompanying your C&P. Did you notice the nice colorful graph in John the Author's post on gay marriage? That should be the bar upon which we gauge the creativity of your posts.

 

[trysail]

An independent Federal Reserve is the only thing that has kept the goddamned POLITICIANS ( be they "D" or "R" ) from turning the U.S. into a full blown banana republic. Arthur Burns and Alan Greenspan both took this country down the garden path by pandering to the politicians.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
( Fair Use Excerpt )
Full article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ayDTHN41F4fQ&pos=7

Fed Presidents, Lawmakers Step Up Clash on Appointment Process
By Scott Lanman

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve regional bank presidents and U.S. lawmakers intensified a clash over giving Congress a greater say in appointing the central bank officials, who are now named in part by private-sector banks.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said yesterday proposed legislation to subject some officials to Senate confirmation is a “blatant politicization” of the Fed. Separately, seven House Democrats called for an “exploration of possible changes” in how the Fed is governed, saying there’s an “inherent conflict” in the way presidents are named.

Proposed legislation in the Senate risks higher inflation if there’s too much political pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low while the economy rebounds, some former Fed officials say. Lawmakers say private-sector banks have too much influence at the Fed, and that the regional Fed bank presidents focus too much on inflation at the expense of job growth.

“This is going to be a big battle,” said former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley, now a senior economic adviser to New York-based Soleil Securities Corp. “The danger is the new arrangement will politicize the Fed to the point that they don’t do what’s necessary” when the central bank needs to raise interest rates, he said.

The powers and autonomy of the 12 regional Fed presidents are under threat on several fronts in Congress.

Under a draft bill released Nov. 10 by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, directors at each regional bank would be chosen by the Fed’s Senate-confirmed governors, and each board chairman would be subject to White House appointment and Senate approval. Currently, two-thirds of directors are chosen by private-sector banks and one-third by the Fed’s Washington-based governors.

Vote on Policy
The boards of directors of each Fed bank select the president, who votes on monetary policy and is approved by Fed governors in Washington.

Dodd, who will begin debate on his financial-overhaul legislation today, also proposed stripping bank-supervision authority from the Fed and its regional banks and called the Fed’s regulation an “abysmal failure.”

The House Financial Services Committee voted on Nov. 17 to amend legislation to limit powers of the regional Fed presidents, so they wouldn’t share the decision-making power awarded the Fed board to oversee financial stability.

“I doubt very much that by a year from now Fed presidents are going to have as big a role as they now have,” Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank told reporters after the vote. Frank said the presidents are “private citizens” who shouldn’t have “governmental powers.” He has said the presidents too often vote in favor of higher interest rates.

Political Appointees
Bullard, 48, the St. Louis Fed’s president since April 2008, said after a speech yesterday that the Fed is ultimately controlled by political appointees as it stands and that the private sector’s input is “invaluable.” Congress has “backed off these kinds of ideas” before and decided to “protect Fed independence,” Bullard said.

“We don’t want to put all the power into Washington and New York,” Bullard said. “That’s just the opposite of what this crisis is teaching us. So you want the input from around the country, and I think it’s really important for informing monetary policy.”

Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said Nov. 17 that the mix of private and public influence has “helped us keep focused on long-run objectives.”

“I wouldn’t want to see the reserve bank governance mechanism politicized in any way,” Lacker, 54, told reporters after a speech in Richmond, Virginia. Asked if Dodd’s plan would politicize the process, Lacker said: “I think it could.”

******​

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Alisna_and_Summers_Central_Bank_Independence_vs_Inflation.gif

 

[trysail]

I rather doubt that the author would want credit on this website for the following pieces. The author is thoroughly familiar with and eminently qualified to comment on banking.

Last week, by way of my extended complaint that President Obama doesn’t seem to have a clue as to how the world works [ see quotation below ], I made the point (which should be obvious on its face) that bad things happen when politicians meddle in the banking business.


And the examples keep rolling in.

Do you remember OneUnited Bank? No? It is the country’s largest minority-owned bank, and was in the news last December after Barney Frank and Maxine Waters leaned on the Treasury Department to give it $12 million in TARP money.


Now you remember! That Frank/Waters gambit, you are reminding yourself, was simply another instance of crusading lawmakers intervening to make sure minority borrowers have continued access to credit.

Except that that’s not quite what happened. OneUnited might be minority-owned, but it’s nobody’s idea of a minority lender. It does not write inner-city mortgages, for instance. (Instead, the bank lends on properties in areas like Martha’s Vineyard and Boston’s South Shore.) Its CRA ratings have lately ranged from fair to poor. In October of 2008, OneUnited signed a cease-and-desist order with regulators that required, among other things, that it sell a Porsche SUV and Malibu mansion it owned for the benefit of its executives.


All of which is to say, this is basically a corrupt, failing institution that serves no economic purpose beyond what thousands of other well-run, solvent, banks already serve more effectively. But the bank’s management has got an in in Washington. So when two powerful congressmen wanted the federal government to give it $12 million, it got its $12 million.

And now it turns out that—surprise!—that money basically went down a rathole. The Boston Globe reports OneUnited has now missed three consecutive quarterly TARP dividends over the past four quarters. Pathetic! Even for a bank as apparently messed up as this one, that’s an astonishingly poor performance.


Thus you see, yet again, what happens when the pols get involved. In this case, the taxpayers’ “investment” has not resulted in an expansion of credit. (OneUnited’s assets are actually 10% lower than they were last year). Nor has the government received much in the way of dividends. No one has apparently benefitted from this whole, sorry transaction other than the bank’s executives and, presumably, Barney Frank and Maxine Waters. It’s been total and complete waste.

In the grand scheme of the credit crunch, of course, the OneUnited fiasco is a blip. But it’s an expensive and pointless blip. That’s something to remember next time you see President Obama and his pals start leaning on the banking industry and telling it they expects big things. What we’ll all end up with, you can be sure, will be big, costly disasters.

"...my extended complaint that President Obama doesn’t seem to have a clue as to how the world works...":

Remember, during the presidential campaign, how we all kept going on and on about how smart Barack Obama is? Remember?

Turns out we were wrong! I can’t speak to topics like foreign affairs or macroeconomics, but I do know about banking. And I will say flat out that Obama’s approach to dealing with bankers and the banking industry has been brainless. It is shocking to see what the guy appears to not know.


On Monday, the President summoned the heads of the country’s big banks to try to jawbone them into lending more. “America’s big banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers,” he said after the meeting. “Now that they’re back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild the economy.”

Really? If the President wants the banks to start lending more, he might spend less time yammering at CEOs and more time talking to his own regulators. They don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Instead, regulators are apparently doing all they can to ensure that banks keep their lending to a minimum. For example, they now seem to be insisting banks maintain minimum capital standards meaningfully above the published, official bogeys. Before the credit crunch hit, for instance, OCC policy said a bank would be considered “adequately capitalized” if it carried a Tier 1 capital ratio of 4%, and “well-capitalized” if it carried a Tier 1 ratio of 6%. It was simple. Right there in print.


And now—who knows? Regulators won’t come out and admit they’ve moved the goalposts but, as multiple conversations I’ve lately had with bank CEOs show, they have. Now, apparently, it takes a 10% Tier 1 ratio to be considered well-capitalized, and regulators don’t mind if banks are even a tad over that. This is not an official policy change, remember, but rather a de facto shift that’s happening at bank after bank across the country.

Mr. President, the arithmetic couldn’t be simpler: the higher the capital ratio, the less credit is available and the more it costs! So if you want more credit to flow into economy, tell your regulators to stop the freelancing and stick to their published policy. It should be a short conversation. They work for you. You might also tell them to ease off their tactic of forcing banks to downgrade (and take added reserves for) loans that are current and cash-flowing. Each loan is different, of course, but if a borrower has managed to stay current to this point in the cycle, his lender isn’t necessarily being imprudent if it gives him the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, banks will have to take redundant reserves and will have less capital to use to facilitate lending. This really isn’t hard.


President Obama’s ignorance of how banking works seems to be nearly encyclopedic. He accuses the banks he spoke with Monday of playing a big role in causing the credit crunch. For the most part, they did not. (The main culprits have all long since collapsed.) He says the big banks should be grateful for the “extraordinary assistance” they received from the government. But except for Citi, none of the big banks even wanted the money. He keeps pushing this misbegotten Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But the effect of the CFPA would be to constrict credit, not expand it. His understanding of reality seems to be upside down and backwards.

It’s also a jarring to hear the President talk about the “extraordinary commitment” he expects lenders to now make. The last time the government wanted that kind of concerted effort from the lending industry, things didn’t turn out so well. Then, the goal was the expansion of home ownership—everyone from President Bush to Barney Frank was all for it—and the key tool banks used to get there was an emphasis on subprime lending. I don’t need to remind you how that ended.


The banking business isn’t complicated. Banks borrow money at one interest rate and turn around it and lend it at another, higher rate. If enough borrowers repay their loans, banks will turn a profit and will be able to lend even more. A kind of virtuous circle will ensue. If enough borrowers don’t repay their loans, all hell breaks loose. That’s why political meddling in the lending business (that is, elected officials’ lobbying bankers to make uneconomic loans) can be so toxic to the economy. I don’t get why President Obama persists in meddling now.

Nobody is asking Barack Obama to turn into the second coming of J.P. Morgan. But he might at least grasp the basics. Can’t any of the economic graybeards who endorsed him last year pick up the phone and explain the way the world works? We’re told he’s very bright. It wouldn’t likely be a long or difficult conversation.

 

[trysail]

I don't know whether to put this one under the "Barney Frank" thread or "The Bankrupt United States of America" thread ( http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=548042 ).

The goddamn pols keep trying to invent a perpetual motion machine and all they've succeeded in doing is flushing gargantuan amounts of taxpayer money down the drain. Government interference in the mortgage market is A BAD IDEA. It always was A BAD IDEA. It always will be A BAD IDEA. It is DOOMED TO FAIL— none of which will ever stop 'em, of course.

The bubble and subsequent collapse of the housing market was largely due to the existence of Fannie and Freddie. So..., let's do it all over again! What a great idea!

The use of "logic" "reality" and "Washington, D.C." in the same phrase is, of course, an oxymoron.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
( Emphasis mine )
Frank to Recommend Replacing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
By Dawn Kopecki and Alison Vekshin

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Representative Barney Frank said his committee will push to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seized by regulators almost 17 months ago, with a different model for U.S. mortgage financing.

“The committee will be recommending abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said at a hearing in Washington today. “That’s the approach, rather than a piecemeal one.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, have received $110.6 billion in taxpayer-funded aid since regulators took over the government-sponsored enterprises in September 2008 after determining they had inadequate capital to deal with a rise in mortgage defaults.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview yesterday that he doesn’t think Congress will be able to pass legislation restructuring the companies until next year.

“We are committed to propose a set of detailed reforms beginning this year,” Geithner said in an interview on “PBS NewsHour.” “I don’t think we’re going to be able to legislate that until that process can start until next year, because it’s just a complicated thing to get right.”

“But we are completely supportive and agree completely with the need to make sure that we take a cold, hard look at what the future of those institutions should be in our country,” he said in the interview....

*****​

$5 Trillion
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in U.S. residential debt.

Fannie Mae was created in the 1930s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” plan to revive the economy. Freddie Mac was started in 1970. The companies were designed primarily to lower the cost of home ownership by buying mortgages from lenders, freeing up cash at banks to make more loans. They make money by financing mortgage-asset purchases with low-cost debt and on guarantees of home-loan securities they create out of loans from lenders.

Full article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahcB4xFe0WZg&pos=7

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Washington D.C. rule of thumb...

If at first you don't succeed spend all the money you can try and make it work then shovel it down the drain and start all over again.

If government was run as a business it would have went under long ago. The product(s) they have to sell are in most cases useless to the american public.

And any board of directors worth their salt would have replaced every single operating manager five time over by now.

 

[trysail]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011...them-bury-them-the-rise-of-fannie-and-freddie



'Kill Them, Bury Them': The Rise Of Fannie And Freddie

How a ferocious lobbying effort helped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac grow rich and powerful.

by Alex Blumberg

Before the financial crisis, many Americans had never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Today, we own them.

The federal government took over Fannie and Freddie after bailing them out in 2008. The bailout cost taxpayers more than the bailouts of GM, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup combined.
By 2010, roughly 90 percent of all new mortgages issued in this country went through the U.S. government. For all intents and purposes, the $1.5 trillion U.S. mortgage market is now a government-run industry.

http://npr.org/news/graphics/2011/03/gr-pm-bailout-462.gif

How did we get here?...


more...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011...them-bury-them-the-rise-of-fannie-and-freddie

Answer:
Corruption on a scale so massive that it is beyond the comprehension of those who haven't watched it rise and who don't witness it on a daily basis. You can draw a straight line starting with Franklin Roosevelt straight through Lyndon Johnson to Franklin Raines to Daniel Mudd to Jamie Gorelick to Barney Frank. That's how we got here.

 

[trysail]

How does someone who is so completely and utterly clueless about banking and finance end up in a position to do so much damage? Frank is a brainless idiot whose sole intent is to keep his hand in the cookie jar.


______________________

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=apRZvH5HoBBA

Frank Bill Would Cut Regional Fed Presidents From Rate Votes
By Phil Mattingly

May 3 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is pushing to remove the power regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents have to weigh in on interest-rate decisions.

Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced legislation today that would remove from the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee the five rotating regional representatives. The 12 regional presidents are each selected by a nine-member board and approved by the Fed’s Board of Governors.

“Under current law, more than one-third of the votes cast are made by regional Federal Reserve representatives -- people who are neither appointed by the President nor subject to Senate confirmation,” Frank said today in a statement. “These men and women are chosen by a self-perpetuating group of private citizens who disproportionally represent the private financial services industry.”

Frank, the former chairman of the Financial Services panel, will need Republican support to move his bill through the House, which is controlled by Republicans. The measure would not affect the seven president-appointed Fed governors.


more...
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=apRZvH5HoBBA

 

[Loring2]

Lena Horne?

I don't know if that's Lena Horne my dear but that young lady can have anything she wants in my 'wonderful world of wanking'

Definately a keeper and don't you call me a dirty old man ... I hear enough of that every day.

JEL

 

[trysail]

Here's a real reason for giving thanks this year. I think ol' Barney ought to seek work in the lending business or running a bank.

____________________

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...seek-re-election-in-2012-plans-to-retire.html



House’s Frank Won’t Seek Re-Election in 2012, Plans to Retire
By Phil Mattingly
November 28, 2011

U.S. Representative Barney Frank, co-author of the largest rewrite of Wall Street’s rules since the Great Depression, won’t seek re-election in 2012, according to a statement released by his office.

Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, led the panel during the 2008 credit crisis and was a lead negotiator on the $700 billion banking-industry bailout. In 2009 and 2010, he served as the lead House negotiator on what would become the Dodd-Frank Act -- a 2,300 page overhaul of the U.S. financial regulatory system.

One of the first openly gay members of Congress, Frank has served in the House since 1981, representing a district that includes Boston suburbs Newton and Brookline and stretches out to cities including Taunton and Fall River.

Frank, 71, will make a formal announcement today at a press conference in Newton. He also will meet with reporters in Washington tomorrow to discuss his plan to retire, according to the statement.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...seek-re-election-in-2012-plans-to-retire.html

 

[trysail]

Good Riddance, Barney Frank
The "smartest man in Congress" wreaked havoc on millions of lives
By Thomas Brown

You’ll forgive me if I don’t bother hiding my sheer joy in hearing the news that Barney Frank isn’t running for re-election and will be leaving Congress. Even as hyper-partisan liberal Democratic Congressmen go, the man has been a calamity for the country. His relentless pursuit of housing policies that we now know were insane had the effect of bringing misery to millions of Americans—and his authorship of the disastrous Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill will help assure the misery of millions more for years to come. The man is a petty, partisan, small-minded bully. The country will be better off with him and his toxic ideas out of Washington. Good riddance.



Where to begin? First, perhaps no single individual on the planet bears more responsibility for the creation of the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse than Barney Frank does. As the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, he had tremendous sway over federal housing policy, both when he was in the majority and the minority. And he used that sway to terribly misguided ends. In the name of expanding affordable housing, for instance, he, more than anyone else, pushed subprime mortgage lending as official government policy--even to the exclusion of basic lending prudence. In particular, he pushed the GSEs to lower the underwriting standards of loans that they would buy or guarantee, then he pushed the GSEs to grow, grow, grow. And what of the ballooning credit risk to the government that resulted from all this? He simply didn’t care about it. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness [in the regulation of the GSEs] that we have in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision.,” he famously said back in 2003 as the bubble was inflating. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

Roll the dice! With your tax dollars! Billions of them! Worse, Frank was oblivious to the fact that the Fannie and Freddie were hopelessly undercapitalized and posed huge financial risk to the federal government. He was willfully blind. “[Fannie and Freddie] are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” he said in 2003. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." Could he have been more wrong? For someone who was consistently voted by staffers as the brightest member of Congress, his view of the GSEs was pathetically stupid.



The result of Frank’s efforts: millions of borrowers were given loans they couldn’t hope to repay. Collectively, they lost millions of dollars in outsized mortgage payments—and then lost heir homes, to boot. Millions more are still trapped in their in their houses, now worth less than the amounts they borrowed to finance them. Thanks, Barney!

It gets worse. Once the housing bubble that Frank did so much to engineer collapsed, it was Barney Frank who led the push to overhaul the re-regulation of the financial services industry, in the form of the infamous Dodd-Frank bill. No one yet seems to know what’s in all of this monstrosity—it’s 2,300 pages long, remember—but its best-known highlights will all serve to constrict credit creation and slow economic growth generally. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, for example, will drive down availability of consumer debt and make it more expensive. The added layers of new regulation Dodd-Frank puts in place will make many community banks economically unviable and drive them out of business. The Volcker Rule will diminish the breadth and depth of the financial markets. The Durbin Amendment is leading to higher service charges on checking accounts as well as higher minimum deposit requirements.



It goes on and on. The likely result of Frank’s atrocity: constricted credit creation and subpar economic growth, which in turn could mean chronically high unemployment for years to come. Thanks again, Barney!

It is wonderful news that soon Barney Frank will no longer be darkening the halls of Congress. Through his over-the-top partisanship and misbegotten ideas, he’s done the country a lot of ill. The sooner he’s gone, the better.

 

[JackLuis]

See what happens when people do what the Government tells them to do?

Bye bye Barney, bye bye.

 

[Dragonlipz]

Trysail - you need to show us the government regulation (signed by Barney Frank) that required mortgage brokers to falsify applications. Until you do, you will not be taken seriously.

Plus, I'm really disappointed there was no colorful graph or chart accompanying your C&P. Did you notice the nice colorful graph in John the Author's post on gay marriage? That should be the bar upon which we gauge the creativity of your posts.

Good one DA but don't expect 3Sale to appreciate or honor the truth....it DOESN'T exist in his lil world....amazing to me that since BF was only the Chairman in 2006 after 14 years of Repubtard domination in the house that 3Sale would figure Barney was in Charge....not a whole lot of intelligence on his part or Zeb Carter, his daddy......both a pair of nards.....

 

[Boxlicker101]

Quote:
Originally Posted by DeeZire
Trysail - you need to show us the government regulation (signed by Barney Frank) that required mortgage brokers to falsify applications. Until you do, you will not be taken seriously.

Plus, I'm really disappointed there was no colorful graph or chart accompanying your C&P. Did you notice the nice colorful graph in John the Author's post on gay marriage? That should be the bar upon which we gauge the creativity of your posts.

Good one DA but don't expect 3Sale to appreciate or honor the truth....it DOESN'T exist in his lil world....amazing to me that since BF was only the Chairman in 2006 after 14 years of Repubtard domination in the house that 3Sale would figure Barney was in Charge....not a whole lot of intelligence on his part or Zeb Carter, his daddy......both a pair of nards.....

First, mortgage brokers do not prepare applications for mortgages, so they would be unable to falsify them. Those asking for loans prepare the applications and would do any falsification that might have been done. The mortgage brokers were under great bureaucratic pressure to approve loans even though they might turn out bad, so they sometimes ignored the falsifications.

Second, as a member of Congress, BF would not sign regulations of any kind. As the chairman of the banking committee, he signed off on bills that went to the House, but they were not laws yet. I don't believe Congress passes regulations, except to govern their own actions.

Third, BF became chairman of the committee in Jan. 2007, and just over a year later, the whole bubble exploded. He wasn't the only one responsible; it was the result of forty years or more of the gov. interfering in business practices that were designed to avoid losing money. Even so, if I were making a list of the persons to blame, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd would go to the top of the list for their failure to foresee problems and take any steps to alleviate them.

 

[trysail]

Dear god, not again !!! We finally got rid of a clown who arguably did more damage to the U.S. financial system than any one man in history and the dimwit wants an encore?


It's a toss-up as to which is the bigger economic illiterate and buffoon: Malarkey or Barney?







http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...s-he-s-interested-in-interim-senate-seat.html


Barney Frank Says He’s Interested in Interim Senate Seat
By Jonathan D. Salant
January 4, 2013

Barney Frank, who just retired from the U.S. House, now would like to serve in the Senate.

Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said today that he has asked the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, to make him the interim appointee once Senator John Kerry is confirmed as U.S. secretary of state. Frank, 72, would serve until a special election is held later in the year to fill Kerry’s seat through the 2014 election.

“Congressman Frank is a gifted legislator and he would be a great senator even on an interim basis,” Patrick told reporters today, according to a transcript released by his office. “There are factors I am considering and he is definitely on the list.”

The governor has said his preference is to appoint someone who wouldn’t then run for the seat, and Frank said he wasn’t interested in becoming a candidate for it. Massachusetts law calls for a special election to be held between 145 to 160 days following the vacancy.

After serving for 32 years in the House, Frank declined to seek re-election in November. He said today he wants to be part of the debate as Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration look for alternatives to automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect March 1. The timetable for the reductions was pushed back two months under a bill Congress approved earlier this week that averted income tax increases for most Americans.

‘Important Months’
Obama and Republican lawmakers also are heading toward a confrontation over raising the nation’s debt ceiling. The U.S. reached its $16.4 trillion legal debt limit on Dec. 31, and the Treasury Department began using extraordinary measures to finance the government. It will exhaust that avenue as early as mid-February, the Congressional Budget Office says.

“February, March, and April are going to be among the most important months in American financial history,” Frank said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today.

“I’ve told the governor I would like, frankly, to do that; I would like to be a part of that,” he said, referring to serving in the Senate.

Frank is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, He co-authored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that increased regulation of the banking industry following the 2007-2009 recession.

Markey Candidacy
Democratic Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts announced his candidacy for the Senate seat Dec. 27 and quickly gained the backing of Kerry and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Former U.S. Senator Scott Brown, a Republican, is considering running after losing his re-election bid to Democrat Elizabeth Warren in November. Brown won a special election in January 2010 to fill the seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat.

Frank was the first openly gay member of the House and would be first openly gay male senator. Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay member of the Senate when she was sworn into office this week.

Obama nominated Kerry, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, on Dec. 21 to succeed Hillary Clinton as the top U.S. diplomat.

Good Riddance, Barney Frank
The "smartest man in Congress" wreaked havoc on millions of lives
By Thomas Brown

You’ll forgive me if I don’t bother hiding my sheer joy in hearing the news that Barney Frank isn’t running for re-election and will be leaving Congress. Even as hyper-partisan liberal Democratic Congressmen go, the man has been a calamity for the country. His relentless pursuit of housing policies that we now know were insane had the effect of bringing misery to millions of Americans—and his authorship of the disastrous Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill will help assure the misery of millions more for years to come. The man is a petty, partisan, small-minded bully. The country will be better off with him and his toxic ideas out of Washington. Good riddance.



Where to begin? First, perhaps no single individual on the planet bears more responsibility for the creation of the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse than Barney Frank does. As the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, he had tremendous sway over federal housing policy, both when he was in the majority and the minority. And he used that sway to terribly misguided ends. In the name of expanding affordable housing, for instance, he, more than anyone else, pushed subprime mortgage lending as official government policy--even to the exclusion of basic lending prudence. In particular, he pushed the GSEs to lower the underwriting standards of loans that they would buy or guarantee, then he pushed the GSEs to grow, grow, grow. And what of the ballooning credit risk to the government that resulted from all this? He simply didn’t care about it. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness [in the regulation of the GSEs] that we have in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision.,” he famously said back in 2003 as the bubble was inflating. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

Roll the dice! With your tax dollars! Billions of them! Worse, Frank was oblivious to the fact that the Fannie and Freddie were hopelessly undercapitalized and posed huge financial risk to the federal government. He was willfully blind. “[Fannie and Freddie] are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” he said in 2003. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." Could he have been more wrong? For someone who was consistently voted by staffers as the brightest member of Congress, his view of the GSEs was pathetically stupid.



The result of Frank’s efforts: millions of borrowers were given loans they couldn’t hope to repay. Collectively, they lost millions of dollars in outsized mortgage payments—and then lost heir homes, to boot. Millions more are still trapped in their in their houses, now worth less than the amounts they borrowed to finance them. Thanks, Barney!

It gets worse. Once the housing bubble that Frank did so much to engineer collapsed, it was Barney Frank who led the push to overhaul the re-regulation of the financial services industry, in the form of the infamous Dodd-Frank bill. No one yet seems to know what’s in all of this monstrosity—it’s 2,300 pages long, remember—but its best-known highlights will all serve to constrict credit creation and slow economic growth generally. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, for example, will drive down availability of consumer debt and make it more expensive. The added layers of new regulation Dodd-Frank puts in place will make many community banks economically unviable and drive them out of business. The Volcker Rule will diminish the breadth and depth of the financial markets. The Durbin Amendment is leading to higher service charges on checking accounts as well as higher minimum deposit requirements.


It goes on and on. The likely result of Frank’s atrocity: constricted credit creation and subpar economic growth, which in turn could mean chronically high unemployment for years to come. Thanks again, Barney!

It is wonderful news that soon Barney Frank will no longer be darkening the halls of Congress. Through his over-the-top partisanship and misbegotten ideas, he’s done the country a lot of ill. The sooner he’s gone, the better.

 

[lovecraft68]

What's the matter Try sail? Did they get to mean for you over in the GB so you had to come here?

Were you laughed off all of the legitimate political discussion forums?

Why do you bring this to what is supposed to be a writers forum, so you can wow us with your superior knowledge of cut and paste arguing?

You were that kid that copied off the kid next to him in school weren't you?

another parrot using google to make whatever lame ass point you're trying to make.

Next week Trysail's thread will be brought to you by the home page of Yahoo and MSN.

Take it to the GB where it and you belong.

 

[TxRad]

What's the matter Try sail? Did they get to mean for you over in the GB so you had to come here?

Were you laughed off all of the legitimate political discussion forums?

Why do you bring this to what is supposed to be a writers forum, so you can wow us with your superior knowledge of cut and paste arguing?

You were that kid that copied off the kid next to him in school weren't you?

another parrot using google to make whatever lame ass point you're trying to make.

Next week Trysail's thread will be brought to you by the home page of Yahoo and MSN.

Take it to the GB where it and you belong.

He's been beating this poor dead horse around here for three years already.

A whole 94 posts.

 

[trysail]

*the usual mix of ignorance and illiteracy*

You make it easy to understand why the Buddy Ciancis of this world get elected.

 

[lovecraft68]

You make it easy to understand why the Buddy Ciancis of this world get elected.

And you make it easy to understand why this country is in the shape its in.

There is not an original thought in your head, all your arguments, if that's what you want to call them-because usually they're just 'woe is us look at this-are copied and pasted from whatever crybaby site you surf all day.

Get a life and stop posting this shit on a porn site.

Funny thing is you come here thinking you're going to wow the pervs with your astute knowledge, instead you get mocked just like you do every where else in your sad existence.

 

[TxRad]

You make it easy to understand why the Buddy Ciancis of this world get elected.

And you make it easy to understand how Fox "News" stays in business.

Give it a rest already or as was said above, take somewhere where people actually care what you cut and paste.

Oh wait, never mind. There is no such place.

 

[trysail]

I made the mistake of listening to an NPR interview of Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, this morning.

It was painfully and patently obvious that the man is completely and utterly clueless about banking. How on earth does someone with absolutely no understanding of banking— someone with no experience, whatsoever, in the field— someone who has never made a loan— end up as one of its politicians-in-chief? God help us all.

Any idiot can lend money. The hard part is getting it back.​

I think this is a case where Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound. They're not in danger of going under…I think they are in good shape going forward.

—Barney Frank (D-Mass.),
House Financial Services Committee Chairman,
July 14, 2008.​

( Two months later, the government forced the mortgage giants into conservatorships and pledged to invest up to $100 billion in each. )

 

[DeeZire]

I made the mistake of listening to an NPR interview of Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, this morning.

It was painfully and patently obvious that the man is completely and utterly clueless about banking. How on earth does someone with absolutely no understanding of banking— someone with no experience, whatsoever, in the field— someone who has never made a loan— end up as one of its politicians-in-chief? God help us all....

Keep in mind, Trysail, that politicians are like actors reading a script. The script writers are their staff - the same people who write the legislation (with the help of the lobbyists who are there to water down the legislation.) If Barney Frank has to speak off the cuff, without his staff there to prompt him, someone as knowledgable (and with as big an ax to grind) as you is going to be disappointed.

Here's a link to new regs mandated by the Dodd/Frank bill. I'm sure you're already aware of them, but didn't post the link because it undermines your theory that consumers - and Barney Frank - are entirely to blame for the mess we're in:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...ied-by-cfpb-as-banks-seek-time-to-comply.html

On the issue of Barney Frank's assumed incompetence, here's one way to look at it. If you have someone with no experience in a the field, they're going to be looking at the big picture, not enmeshed in the little details. It's obvious that some people (like you) can get seduced by the magic of Finance and lose sight of the affect Finance has on the rest of the country. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say about it:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge."

This quote illustrates why we need people like Elizabeth Warren in government to keep people like you from ruining the country. No offense my friend. It's simply a matter of POV.

And BTW, I, for one, really enjoy it when you state your positions, rather than C&P propaganda with no comment. This is, after all, a writer's forum, right?

 

[DeeZire]

Rather than getting into circular arguments about who, or what, was to blame for the financial crash, perhaps we could consider some pre-emptive measures to avoid another one?

First, we'd have to agree that the Preamble charges the government with the duty of promoting the general welfare, and we'd have to agree that the financial crash severely harmed the general welfare. Assuming the government has a legitimate role in regulating business for the purpose of promoting the general welfare, what could they do while still allowing the free market to work? They're already cracking down on unscrupulous lenders. There is still the problem of stupid consumers. I'd suggest:

1. Incorporate Finance into the No Child Left Behind requirements, and if a kid fails that part of the test...

2. Flag that kid as a mortgage risk

3. Require anyone flagged as a mortgage risk to either pass a test or hire a mortgage advisor to assist them. I have no idea how much a mortgage advisor charges, but one would think that the price would go down as more people who have lost their jobs in the financial sector get into that line of work. (There is certification required to become a mortgage advisor.) I'm thinking, if a mortgage consumer takes two hours to go through the process of signing the documents, paying an advisor a couple hundred bucks would be reasonable. This is assuming government regulations force the banks to simplify their mortgage contracts. In the context of a $150,000 loan, $200 is nothing. (I admit, I don't have a clue about this, which is why I'm asking Trysail what he thinks.)

4. For those mortgage consumers who didn't have the benefit of the Finance instruction, require them to also pass a test or use an advisor. We require drivers to pass a test, we should certainly be able to require mortgage consumers to do the same, especially in the context of the dire consequences that can occur when the majority of mortgage consumers are stupid idiots.

Your thoughts, Trysail?