Don’t we wish? That’s not quite what he said. He wants to close them down and create a new housing system from scratch. Can you imagine if every time you completely screwed up at work, you just went to your boss and said “We should just abolish the disaster I created and start from scratch. I know exactly how to do it. Oh, don’t worry that I completely destroyed the company with my last attempt and kept telling you to pour more money into that disaster all the while telling you it was going great.” Here an article from the Wall Street Journal about Frank’s comments.

A top House Democrat on Friday said his committee was preparing to recommend “abolishing” mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuilding the U.S. housing-finance system from scratch.

“The remedy here is…as I believe this 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,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

His comments initially rippled through bond markets on concerns that the government might pull away from the mortgage market. Many believe that’s unlikely and that any revamp would include continued government involvement. The government took over the companies in September 2008 as loan losses mounted.

Please. The government would never pull away from the mortgage market. It’s just another way for them to buy votes and redistribute wealth. There is only one reason that the government needs to be involved in the house financing system. That is to force the cost of buying homes for a select group of people onto the population as a whole. When I go to a local bank and get a mortgage, the bank will charge a high enough interest rate to make it worth it for them to lend me the money. If the rate is too high, I’ll pass. If I think it is just right, I’ll borrow and buy a home. We both win. No one else is forced to pay for my home.

Now, how does the government change this? Well, they artificially lower interest rates and standards to allow otherwise unqualified buyers to buy homes. The cost of money has not changed just because the government wants it to. Someone has to pay the difference between what it normally would cost to borrow at the buyers interest rate and the artificial rate the government sets. That someone is the tax payer. As with all government handouts, they spread the cost of a select few over the entire populace.

Some Republicans have argued that the companies should ultimately be reduced in size and privatized, while at other end of the spectrum, some analysts have recommended turning the companies into government agencies. But several industry groups and academics have suggested that the government is likely to continue playing at least some role in the future of the companies.

One such report came from analysts at Standard & Poor’s this past week. “It’s hard for us to imagine” how enough capital could be attracted to replace Fannie and Freddie with stand-alone private companies that would be able to offer low-cost funding for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the analysts wrote.

Thanks Standard & Poor’s! It’s hard to imagine because you are trapped in our currently reality. Capital will be attracted if it is rewarded properly by the market. If interest rates are allowed to be set by the market instead of being set by our economic emperors, capital will come. Of course they stipulate “low-cost funding”, which goes right back to forcing the cost on all tax payers.

Some analysts have argued that starting from scratch could create more problems than they would solve, in part because Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half of the nation’s $11 trillion in home mortgages. “Blue sky ideas are great, but they take a long time to happen,” said Mahesh Swaminathan, senior mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse, at a conference last month. “When you have $5 trillion of agency mortgages, you can't really orphan them.”

Here’s an idea. Don’t start from scratch. We are in a hole, so stop digging. Discontinue all future operations, and either let the current mortgages pan out (foreclose, payoff, etc) or sell off the mortgages to the highest bidder. We’ve already been screwed by the government here, so get it over with and quit dragging it out. At least then we’d be on a path to the free market. By the way, did anyone find the clause in the Constitution that says the Federal government can even be involved in housing finance. Yes Mrs. Pelosi, I’m serious.

Mr. Frank, who didn’t elaborate on forthcoming recommendations, said last month that one possible revamp could merge some functions of Fannie and Freddie that overlap with the Federal Housing Administration into the government mortgage-insurance agency.

The Obama administration said it will weigh in on how to revamp the companies—and the entire housing-finance system—when it releases its budget next month. Republicans have increasingly criticized the administration for moving to overhaul the financial sector without spelling out plans for Fannie and Freddie.

In a PBS interview on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the legislative process to overhaul Fannie, Freddie and the housing-finance system was unlikely to begin this year. “It’s just a complicated thing to get right,” he said. “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.”

via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Should Be Eliminated, Barney Frank Says – WSJ.com.

Thank God Geithner and Obama will weigh in on this soon. They have just been so great up to this point on economic matters.  I am sure our socialist President will come up with a great market based system, right? Be ready for a new welfare program, created from scratch by the most socialist government we’ve had in my life time.

According to a post on The Business Insider, the Treasury department gave Fannie and Freddie a blank check, so they can be as stupid as they want to be.

The Treasury snuck in another big bailout on Christmas Eve: It removed the cap on the amount of money it will provide to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cover their ongoing mortgage losses. There is now no limit on how much we taxpayers will shovel down these black holes.

The move is designed to reassure Fannie and Freddie bondholders, who provide a lot of the money the companies use to support the housing market. These bondholders have now apparently been given an explicit government guarantee, in perpetuity. The move is also obviously designed to continue to prop up house prices, which, thanks to artificially low mortgage rates, are still above long-term norms.

On a more positive note, the Treasury also announced that it will stop buying Fannie and Freddie mortgages (though the Fed will presumably keep doing so). The total bailout so far is $111 billion.

The removal of the cap will further distort prices and activity in the housing market, which is now massively subsidized by government programs. It will continue to reward bondholders for being stupid. And it will likely result in additional huge losses for taxpayers.

It was obviously not an accident that the Treasury announced the plan after the market close on Christmas Eve, or that the press-release headline made the announcement sound like a mere “update.” Republicans, understandably, are screaming.

via Geithner Gives Housing Industry A Huge Christmas Present: Unlimited Fannie And Freddie Bailouts.

If you were told no matter what risky investments you made you would not take loses, would you be more risky or less? Apparently, the government thinks that removing the risk is the best way to fix these irresponsible government sponsored entities.

This must be more of the transparency of the Obama administration releasing this information on Christmas Eve, when most people are trying to enjoy time with their families. Little did they know, they were getting bent over by the government again.

Was Bush, Obama and Geithner really “bailing out Wall Street in order to bail out Main Street”? It sure not looking like it.

TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky keeps committing flagrant acts of political transparency, which if nothing else ought to inform the debate going forward over financial reform. In his latest bombshell, the IG discloses that the New York Federal Reserve did not believe that AIG’s credit-default swap (CDS) counterparties posed a systemic financial risk.

Hello?

For the last year, the entire Beltway theory of the financial panic has been based on the claim that the “opaque,” unregulated CDS market had forced the Fed to take over AIG and pay off its counterparties, lest the system collapse. Yet we now learn from Mr. Barofsky that saving the counterparties was not the reason for the bailout.

In the fall of 2008 the New York Fed drove a baby-soft bargain with AIG’s credit-default-swap counterparties. The Fed’s taxpayer-funded vehicle, Maiden Lane III, bought out the counterparties’ mortgage-backed securities at 100 cents on the dollar, effectively canceling out the CDS contracts. This was miles above what those assets could have fetched in the market at that time, if they could have been sold at all.

The New York Fed president at the time was none other than Timothy Geithner, the current Treasury Secretary, and Mr. Geithner now tells Mr. Barofsky that in deciding to make the counterparties whole, “the financial condition of the counterparties was not a relevant factor.”

This is startling. In April we noted in these columns that Goldman Sachs, a major AIG counterparty, would certainly have suffered from an AIG failure. And in his latest report, Mr. Barofsky comes to the same conclusion. But if Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn’t driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why pay Goldman and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax dollars to make them whole?

Who was Treasury Secretary and worked hand in hand with Geithner to bail out Goldman Sachs, I mean AIG? Henry Paulson. Where did Henry Paulson work prior to becoming Treasury Secretary? What do you know, Goldman Sachs. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. I’m sure one man couldn’t force the spending of billions of tax payer dollars to bail out the company he ran. Wonder if there are any other politicians that are involved with Goldman. Let’s see!

• Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, and one of Obama’s go to guys
• Joshua Bolten, White House Chief of Staff under Bush
• Jon Corzine, who just lost his Governorship even after Obama stumped like hell for him
• George Herbert Walker IV, a Bush family member
• Robert Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State under Bush
• Oh, and there’s more, but I’m beginning to throw up in my mouth a little. You get the point.

Ron Paul to Geithner: Fed as Lender of Last Resort Contributes to