One Thing About the Financial Crisis I've Never Understood
by rrusczyk, Jan 4, 2010, 12:06 AM
Why aren't people more furious about Fannie and Freddie? I just don't understand that. We've burned far more taxpayer money on them than we have on pretty much everything else -- AIG, all the banks, the car companies -- combined. Yet we pull out the pitchforks over the bankers getting fat paychecks and say nothing over the execs at Fannie and Freddie getting huge paychecks. There's more than a little evidence that Fannie and Freddie are the epicenter of the earthquake, not the evil banks, the scumbag mortgage brokers, or even the ignorant (or amoral/immoral) borrowers. Here's a post from MoneyIllusion that not only explains some of this evidence, but also cogently discusses the dangers of blindly accepting received wisdom (including your own!).
February 2012
January 2012