Are Fannie and Freddie Screwed? Bush Hopes So

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on July 21, 2008, Printed on July 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91765/

President Bush made it his sub rosa mission to end the hegemony of these two Democrats-in-waiting companies. I don't even think he understood what the guarantee was or what they were supposed to do. -- Jim Cramer, "An Elegy for Fannie and Freddie"

In January, I wrote a cultural analysis of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more casually known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how the Bush administration might be trying to take them down. Ex-CEO Franklin Delano Raines was in court and accusing Bush of what the Washington Post described as "a coordinated plan within the Bush administration to depress Fannie Mae's stock price," which would have gotten more play in the press were it not for the fact that Raines was accused by Fannie Mae's overseer, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), of skimming millions off the top for himself. The soap opera thickened under the weight of the fact that OFHEO director James B. Lockhart was not only a Bush contributor but a loyalist who went to school with him at Yale. And while the two parties, and their political parties, waged war with each other over control of two government-sponsored entities, the housing meltdown caught serious fire.

It has since cratered.