{"id":24607,"date":"2011-11-29T00:12:11","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T06:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24607"},"modified":"2011-11-29T00:15:51","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T06:15:51","slug":"to-be-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24607","title":{"rendered":"To Be Frank"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Frannie, Freddie, I got an offer ‘ya can’t refuse, see…<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

Barney Frank decides his 2012 re-election is another entity that’s too big to fail.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0The coverage of a politician’s announcement of their retirement, not unlike the coverage of their eventual passing, usually reads as an enduring time-capsule.\u00a0 From their fame to their foibles, a few key sentences will forever define a politician who has left the political limelight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Retiring 16-term liberal\u00a0Massachusetts Democrat\u00a0Barney Frank <\/a>had plenty of fame (fierce conservative critic; first openly gay member of Congress) and foibles (a prostitution scandal\u00a0<\/a>that nearly ended his career), all of which were extensively covered by the press as he announced that due in part to redistricting, he was choosing to forgo another run.\u00a0 Yet to read or listen to the mainstream press’ coverage of Frank’s farewell tour, nary a word was spoken or written about what should be\u00a0Frank’s infamous, enduring legacy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0‘These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank<\/a> of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0While the media’s hagiography of Frank dominated the afternoon news cycle (CNN called Frank “a teacher” of Congress), others noted that “Fannie, Freddie Lose A Friend In Frank”<\/a> as Investors Business Daily<\/em>‘s headline remarked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His role as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the Great Recession would have defined\u00a0Frank’s legacy had he been a Republican.\u00a0 Frank’s\u00a0determined\u00a0ability to ignore the housing bubble\u00a0until it was too late to save Fannie\u00a0or Freddie or\u00a0avert the\u00a0financial crisis played a not-insignificant role. And when Fannie and Freddie finally failed, together they accounted for nearly\u00a012 million subprime and other low quality and risky loans (40% of outstanding loans at the time).\u00a0 Most of the loans existed\u00a0to meet\u00a0the affordable housing goals\u00a0that\u00a0Frank, and others, argued so passionately\u00a0to protect at a projected cost to taxpayers of $400 billion.\u00a0 But despite being among those in Washington “at the wheel”, outside of a few more conservative publications, Frank has largely escaped the Joseph Hazelwood<\/a>-esque blame of running the American economy ashore.<\/p>\n

Frank’s defenders can rightly point out\u00a0that he did not become chairman of the HFSC until after the 2006 elections; implying that\u00a0the Fannie & Freddie reign of error happened solely due to the previous Republican majority.\u00a0 Such a defense gets the dates and times correct, but little else.\u00a0\u00a0The expansion of\u00a0housing lending authority had roots in the 1990s, not the 2000s and\u00a0had Frank\u00a0worked with\u00a0Republican\u00a0efforts to constrain Fannie & Freddie,\u00a0instead of insisting that there were no problems, legislation might have been adopted in the early 2000s that could have\u00a0lessen (not prevented, as some may argue)\u00a0the financial crisis.<\/p>\n

Frank tried to undo his part in the Fannie & Freddie story,\u00a0telling Larry Kudlow in a 2010 interview<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cit was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn\u2019t afford and couldn\u2019t really handle once they had it<\/em>” while expressing hopes that Fannie & Freddie would soon occupy the dust-bin of poorly constructed governmental program history.\u00a0 Of course, Frank’s preferred methods of “reform” could easily add another $5 trillion of debt <\/a>to the country’s maxed-out gold card of credit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frannie, Freddie, I got an offer ‘ya can’t refuse, see… Barney Frank decides his 2012 re-election is another entity that’s too big to fail.\u00a0 \u00a0The coverage of a politician’s announcement of their retirement, not unlike the coverage of their eventual passing, usually reads as an enduring time-capsule.\u00a0 From their fame to their foibles, a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,105,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-first-ringer","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24607"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24616,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24607\/revisions\/24616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}