What Fannie & Freddie Didn't Devour, Frank-N-Dodd Will! It's Alive!!!

 

“Reckless Endangerment”

 

A couple of weeks ago National Public Radio interviewed New York Times business correspondent and columnist Gretchen Morgenson about her recent book, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption led to Economic Armageddon, which she co-wrote with Joshua Rosner.
Let me quote two excerpts from the interview.  Here is the first:

“[DAVE] DAVIES: What's fascinating about this story is that you have this entity [i.e., Fannie Mae], which you said became the largest and most powerful financial organization in the world, you had this entity, which has government guarantees and government subsidies, although perhaps indirect, but it engages in major political contributions and lobbying expenses. How big a player were they in terms of contributing to politicians and lobbying?

Ms. MORGENSON: They were very large. The numbers might not seem large in today's terms, but they were extremely shrewd and, you know, took great care, especially of the congressmen that were on the House Financial Services Committee and the senators on the Banking Committee.

They knew that these were very important people to their livelihood and to maintaining the government perquisites as they were.

One of the really big beneficiaries, albeit indirectly, was Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Back in 1991, when Congress was writing the legislation that would, you know, enhance or improve the oversight of Fannie Mae, or so they thought, Frank actually called up the company and asked them to hire his companion, who had just gotten an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business.

Of course the company was happy to provide a job for his companion and rolled out the red carpet in a series of interviews with a variety of executives, and it ultimately did hire the man. And he stayed there for I believe seven years.

So that was an example of the kind of thing that Fannie Mae would do. Now, when I asked Mr. Frank about this, I asked him, did it have any impact on his approach to the company. You know, was it a conflict? Did he feel that it had been a conflicted, put him in a conflicted spot? And he said absolutely not, that he didn't really remember being interested or having much to do with the 1992 legislation.

But the record shows that he was very aggressive and really tough on those who were testifying in Congress about reining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He was very aggressive to, for instance, the head of the Congressional Budget Office at that time, who was trying to call for increased capital requirements and to call for a focus on safety and soundness at Fannie Mae, that Frank really took him apart in testimony.

DAVIES: Right, and you write there were a number of occasions on which he defended Fannie and their record of promoting home ownership but in the end had a different view of the company, right?

Ms. MORGENSON: Well, after the taxpayers had to take it over, he, you know, came around, finally. But by then it was too late. He said: Well, we should shut them down. But, you know, it really was far too late, and he had been such a vocal supporter for so long that it was sort of an odd turnabout.”

Here is the second:

“DAVIES: This book is replete with examples throughout the '90s and 2000s of voices who saw this coming and alerted regulators - or in some cases, people in the regulatory structure who tried to warn us. And one of them I really found fascinating is this guy Walker Todd, this guy from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. And this - well, he found an obscure provision in a law that raised a red flag. Tell us that story.

Ms. MORGENSON: It was interesting. It was 1991. So, again, this is after the savings and loan crisis had shaken everyone's, you know, confidence in the financial - our financial system. There was a new law that was being written to beef up the FDIC's ability to take over failing institutions. It was a good law that was really necessary that came out of the S&L crisis, and it gave regulators more power.

So it was an interesting moment in the writing of that law, that there came a sort of an amendment that had been brought to the floor by Chris Dodd which enabled insurance companies, brokerage firms, non-bank financial companies to tap into the Federal Reserve's special powers in time of crisis.

What that means is that these firms that had not been able to gain access to Federal Reserve borrowings in time of crisis - insurance companies did not have access. Brokerage firms had not had access. It was really only banks that were able to call on the Fed in times of trouble. This small, unnoticed part of the bill that was carried by Dodd expanded the federal safety net to include these companies.

It was a moment nobody noticed, except for Walker Todd, who was a research fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He thought this was fascinating, because the law that this was buried in was supposed to, you know, restrain the ability of financial companies to harm the taxpayer and to create losses that would be funded by the taxpayer. So it was counterintuitive. It was a paradox to Walker Todd that this small thing was inserted into the bill.

He tried to write about it. He, in fact, did write about it. He discovered that it had been inserted by the financial services companies at their request, and he tried to publish a paper talking about this expansion of the federal safety net. He came up against a buzz saw of criticism from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. They tried valiantly to prevent the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from publishing Walker Todd's report.

They failed, happily, and the report was published. But it was very, very interesting the degree to which the Federal Reserve Board seemed to want to keep that little amendment under wraps and to keep it from having the sunlight shone on it by this report that Walker Todd had produced.”

Now, consider that the financial reform bill passed last year was called the Dodd-Frank bill.  How does that make you feel?

By the way, I still believe that it should have been called Frank-N-Dodd.  It's just a matter of time before we learn just how bad a monstrosity it really is so we might as well get used to thinking of it in the same way that we do Frankenstein.