Dodd lets his lender write bailout bill?

The Foundry, Heritage Foundation:

The Washington Examiner has obtained a “confidential and proprietary” document produced by Bank of America and titled “FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008.” The “Discussion Document” dated March 11, 2008, closely resembles the housing bailout bill drafted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) that the Senate is set to vote on within days. Senate staffers have told the Examiner’s Tim Carney, “the bailout section is exactly what Bank of America and Countrywide wanted. Its obvious they got what they asked for.”

Countrywide Financial is at the heart of the mortgage foreclosure crisis. It has $95 billion in loans on its books, many of the adjustable-rate-mortgage loans that have been defaulting at unprecedented rates. Countrywide has lost $2.5 billion in the last three quarters and had $6 billion in nonperforming assets on its book in the first quarter of 2008. Despite these red flags, Bank of America is proceeding to buy Countrywide for $4 billion. Analysts and stockholders have been highly critical of the deal since the beginning, wondering why Bank of America would be willing to take on such financial risk.

The bill about to be voted on by the Senate would allow banks like Bank of America to pick their riskiest loans and dump them on the Federal Housing Administration. In exchange for taking just a 10% cut on the value of the loan, the banks would receive cold hard cash from U.S. taxpayers. Their risk would be eliminated, entirely shifted to the FHA and the U.S. government. Passage of the bill would make Bank of America’s acquisition of Countrywide much more profitable.

...

Hat tip to Larwyn.

It is pretty amazing that Dodd did not notice the conflict of interest here. This raises several questions about the bill that will require close examination. Whether the Democrats will do so is another thing entirely. I would also anticipate an ethics challenge for Dodd. I wonder if Obama's vetters picked up on this when considering him for VP nod?

What is clear is that Democrats are just as ethically challenged as the Republicans were in 2006 and possibley more so. Unfortunately the Republicans don't have any catchy phrase like culture of corruption to wrap them in.

Comments

  1. mike volpe8:55 PM

    Of ocurse he did. The Washington Examiner is reporting this as well. This scandal is biggest scandal that no one in the MSM is talking about. Here is how I summarized it...

    http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2008/06/updated-summary-of-corruption-at.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more