Rant for 2/28/10

The bottomless pit of Fannie Mae is asking for another $15,300,000,000 of our money to flush down the toilet.  In 2008 they lost $59.8 billion.  In 2009 they lost $74.4 billion.  Any guesses to what the 2010 loss will be?  Even more reassuring is the fact that the Treasury holds 79.9% of their stock.  That’s a great investment there, Clark.  And the value of those shares?  Well, in 2000 they were worth $87.81.  They closed Friday at $0.99.  If the Treasury was making my personal investments I would have fired them- and probably sued them for gross incompetence- long ago.  I always though the objective was “buy low, sell high” not “buy high and keep pumping the cash in as it collapses”.  Asshats.

Looking back through Fannie Mae’s list of CEOs is kind of interesting:

Allan Hunter(R), 1970-1981.  He served as a member of the House for four years in the 1950’s.  Carter tried and failed to force his resignation because Fannie was more concerned with making money than helping the poor.  Fannie was losing almost $1,000,000 per day when he retired.

David Maxwell(R), 1981-1991.  When he retired Fannie was making almost $4,000,000 per day.

James Johnson(D), 1991-1998.  He was Mondale’s campaign manager in 1984, so two guesses about his politics.  He was also the first person appointed to run Fannie with absolutely no relevant experience.  Through some accounting fraud, he hid $200 million of expenses and received about $21 million in bonuses.  He was in the running to be Bambi’s running mate until it was found out that Countrywide had given him below market mortgages.  A sterling example of dumocrats ethics.

Franklin Raines(D), 1999-2004.  He accepted “early retirement” in 2004 during an SEC investigation.  Continuing on the same path as his predecessor, Raines also hid expenses and losses to pad his bonuses.  His fraudulent bonuses were around $90 million.  In 2004, in the midst of scandal, his compensation exceeded $20 million.  He also joined Johnson in receiving sweetheart loans from Countrywide.

Daniel Mudd(R?), 2004-2008.  I put a (R?) for him because while he generally tends to support Republicans, he also has donated to Chris Dodd and others.  Wait a minute- wasn’t Dodd mixed up in the whole collapse thing?  Nah, nothing to see here.  Mudd couldn’t have been named better, as he oversaw Fannie’s decline, ultimately ending up as a bloated corpse that the government was trying to revive.

Herbert Allison(R), 208-2009.  A buddy of McCain’s, he failed upward to a position overseeing TARP distribution.

So, to summarize, Fannie went from incompetent (and Carter wanted to make it more so) to solvent, to profitable, to riddled with fraud and greedy dumocrats, to incompetent and insolvent again.

Feel better?  Nah, me neither.  I wonder how many billions they’re going to ask for next quarter?

And here’s the better question- so many of the asshats who stole from their companies and investors are in jail or convicted.  Why weren’t charges ever brought against these asshats?  Especially Johnson and Raines?  The worst that happened to either of them was Raines being sued in civil court to recover a paltry percentage of what he stole.