Forum Post: Enron Scandal - Ken Lay goes to jail, Fannie and Freddie bankrupt country, who went to jail?
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 30, 2011, 2:19 p.m. EST by MikeyD
(581)
from Alameda, CA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Nobody. Why? Because they are the government and the government does not prosecute itself.
Who is with me in calling for the incarceration of Franklin Raines?
Why did the govt guarantee the loans to freddie and fannie? Sounds like the govt has just as much responsibility by trying to get around the free market.
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This article rocks - http://www.academicperspective.com/2009/10/19/an-american-financial-collapse-what-happened-on-wall-street/
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack - not the principle cause.
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This article make a mockery of your assertions - http://www.academicperspective.com/2009/10/19/an-american-financial-collapse-what-happened-on-wall-street/
"A Summary:
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I do not need to admit it, I took the red pill.
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When you read the article and stop the pretentious, childish, nonsense, let me know.
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You have neither cited any source regarding the percentage of sub-prime mortgages nor demonstrated the percentage that were 30 year fixed loans versus ARM loans. You are welcome to try again but 1 + 1 is 10 in binary.
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My arguments have not failed, they have been validated and more facts have been added to dismiss those who are ignorant of their own ignorance.
You fake success well, but some of us know the difference.
Unlike yourself, who is dependent upon baseless alliances rather than objective facts, my principles and direction are not subject to change.
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And I cannot for the life of me figure out why you want to admonish F&F when the responsibility is so clearly that of the investment banks.
F&F are the favorite scape goat for a plutocratic ruse to shore up its defenses by blaming the fall on a struggling underclass, by accusing them of ignorance for accepting loans they could not afford rather than owning up to the responsibility of recovering loaned money and intentionally orchestrating predatory lending and intentional defaults.
F&F is a favorite scape goat to blame the government, by holding the Community Reinvestment act up to public shame when great precaution was deployed and seemed to work, save the Alt-A purchases.
F&F is a favorite scape goat to blame taxation of the privileged on the underprivileged rather than owning up to offshoring industry that would employ the ever growing dependents, if it had been domestically preserved.
I for one am tire of hearing it especially given that the financials are by any objective reason a criminal enterprise - http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-top-1-contribute-367-of-federal-income-taxes-c
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You should not title your post "Willful ignorance" when it is clearly insufficient as a source to satisfy the requirements.
Had you quoted only one line below you would have found the answer -
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported in 2011 that Fannie & Freddie "contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause." GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses that were central to the financial crisis. The GSEs participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders into subprime lending.[95]
As a review of your attempt at evident, you do not yet seem able to use of statistics effectively. Your citation indicates loans that Fannie and Freddie repurchased were to include 42%, 50%, or 56% of the crappy sub-prime ARMs issued by investment banks (and they chose the best among them). At the time of the crash F&F did hold 50% of the housing market. According to your source it also owned $350 billion in Alt-A loans and from my source there were $1.4 trillion of those loans at the time of the crash.
You really should read about predatory lending and how the banks intentionally tried to cause defaults to take houses back and resell them at higher and artificially inflated prices. - good luck
And I cannot for the life of me figure out why you want to admonish F&F when the responsibility is so clearly that of the investment banks.
F&F are the favorite scape goat for a plutocratic ruse to shore up its defenses by blaming the fall on a struggling underclass, by accusing them of ignorance for accepting loans they could not afford rather than owning up to the responsibility of recovering loaned money and intentionally orchestrating predatory lending and intentional defaults.
F&F is a favorite scape goat to blame the government and the Community Reinvestment act.
F&F is a favorite scape goat to blame taxation of the privileged on the underprivileged rather than owning up to offshoring industry that would employ the ever growing dependents, if it had been domestically preserved.
I for one am tire of hearing it especially given that the financials are by any objective reason a criminal enterprise - http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-top-1-contribute-367-of-federal-income-taxes-c
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Willful ignorance on your part; agreed.
I am not inclined to deal in supposition with propagandists, especially those who abandon objectivity for partisanship.
Ad hominem does not affect me and that is all you are now capable of presenting, so I have done your homework for you.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/04/the-subprime-mortgage-market-collapse-a-primer-on-the-causes-and-possible-solutions
Although subprime and other risky mortgages were relatively rare before the mid-1990s, their use increased dramatically during the subsequent decade. In 2001, newly originated subprime, Alt-A, and home equity lines (second mortgages or "seconds") totaled $330 billion and amounted to 15 percent of all new residential mortgages. Just three years later, in 2004, these mortgages accounted for almost $1.1 trillion in new loans and 37 percent of residential mortgages. Their volume peaked in 2006 when they reached $1.4 trillion and 48 percent of new residential mortgages.[3] Over a similar period, the volume of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) collateralized by subprime mortgages increased from $18.5 billion in 1995 to $507.9 billion in 2005.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-A
Because Alt-A loans were not primarily purchased by the GSEs, they thus became more expensive and much harder to find as a result of the general crisis in markets for mortgage-backed securities.
I presume you are capable of accepting that Fannie and Freddie were GSEs. Alt-A 48% of loans in 2006 and again YOU HAVE LOST the debate.
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You should not title your post "Willful ignorance" when it is clearly insufficient as a source to satisfy the requirements.
Had you quoted only one line below you would have found the answer -
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported in 2011 that Fannie & Freddie "contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause." GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses that were central to the financial crisis. The GSEs participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders into subprime lending.[95]
As a review of your attempt at evident, you do not yet seem to be able to use of statistics effectively. Your citation indicates that the loans that Fannie and Freddie repurchased were to include 42%, 50%, or 56% of the crappy sub-prime ARMs issued by investment banks (and they chose the best among them). At the time of the crash F&F did hold 50% of the housing market. According to your source it also owned $350 billion in Alt-A loans and from my source there were 1.5 trillion of those loans at the time of the crash.
Hi buddy!
All, before accepting this premise, please read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14krugman.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1319501238-S+pSXgIjk81A+Na/PatCZQ
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/ Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Storyline
Enron dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in this tale told chronologically. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to 20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with $250 M), and Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. Along the way, we watch Enron game California's deregulated electricity market, get a free pass from Arthur Andersen (which okays the dubious mark-to-market accounting), use greed to manipulate banks and brokerages (Merrill Lynch fires the analyst who questions Enron's rise), and hear from both Presidents Bush what great guys these are. Written by jhailey@hotmail.com
You're wrong: watch ENRON the (documentary) movie, and you will see that some of them went to jail. But yeah, not enough of them.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/1011/houston_fundraiser_drama_6cccc297-f2cd-4cc6-a869-28e72d10b851.html
Exactly. Including the guy who's hosting a fundraiser for the Obamas next month, with Michelle as the guest of honor.
Ken Lay is dead. He was acquitted because he died before his sentencing
0.7 % of the american people
the highest per capita imprisonment rate among all the countries
http://thenewsguysletters.blogspot.com/2009/07/prisoners-per-capita.html
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indeed the drug wars have incarcerated a lot of non-violent drug offenders
copy and past my response to your thread
This guy at an OBM fundraiser?
John D. Arnold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia John Douglas Arnold, born in 1974, is an American hedge fund manager, specializing in natural gas trading. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, is a Houston-based hedge fund that specializes in trading energy products.
Contents [hide] 1 Enron 2 Centaurus 3 References 4 External links
[edit] Enron
After graduating from Vanderbilt University, he began his career as a trader at Enron. After initially working on the Crude Oil desk, Arnold moved over to the Natural Gas Desk upon the departure of Jeff Bussan. Using their new Internet-based trading network, EnronOnline, he is credited with making three quarters of a billion dollars for Enron in 2001 and was rewarded with an $8 million bonus.[1][2] One of his former colleagues dubbed him "the king of natural gas."[3]
[edit] Centaurus
When Enron collapsed in 2002, he founded Centaurus with his previous year's bonus. His company now has as much as $3 billion in assets under management.[4] His employees include several big name energy traders including ex-Enron CEO Greg Whalley,[2] as well as Bill Perkins, Mike Maggi, and Conrad Goerl, previously of MotherRock.[5]
According to Arnold, "After Enron collapsed, there was a general revaluation of credit risk among energy companies. The better credits were less willing to take on the lesser credits as counter parties. So the lesser credits found themselves with fewer counter parties willing to trade with them, even though they still needed to hedge the pricing risks in their business. Hedge funds previously had not been involved in the over-the-counter market, except for the very largest, because the other participants were reluctant to grant credit to that type of entity."[6]
During the collapse of Amaranth Advisors, Centaurus is widely credited as being one of the major players on the other side of their position, and returning as much as 150% in 2005.[7]
At a recent energy conference, Arnold stated that he looks "to place bets on a market that he determines is ‘biased’ ... [W]e ask ourselves can we identify what is forcing a market to price a product at an unfair value, and then, what will push it back to fair value." Arnold also referred to the speculative trading that was taking place on the unregulated over-the-counter Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and NYMEX's Clearport Trading: "Trading never went away ... [W]hat has changed is the non-commercial type of interest ... [B]ecause of this there has never been as much investor interest ... as there is today."[8]
During August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC).[9]
John D. Arnold recently made a rare public speech to the CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission), in which he opposed limits on financially settled trading positions but supported limits in the physical energy futures as they near expiration. As Arnold told the CFTC (in one of the few statements he made that wasn't steeped in trading jargon), "I try to buy things whenever they're trading below what [our] analysis shows to be fair value and sell things whenever our analysis shows that the forward curve is higher than our analysis of fair value." [10][11][12]
In Forbes magazine's 2010 list of The World's Billionaires, John Arnold ranked 212, with a net worth of $4 billion.
In 2009, John Arnold is believed to have made 900 million dollars.[13]
Well, then, it is time for a mel to whitehouse.gov to let them know we're watching?
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Who is that?
Exactly. Including the guy who's hosting a fundraiser for the Obamas next month, with Michelle as the guest of honor.
A former Enron executive who is part of a movement to convert public pensions to 401(k)-style plans is angering some local Democrats.
John Arnold, a Houston billionaire and former Enron trader, is hosting the Michelle Obama event with his wife, Laura Arnold, at their Houston home on Nov. 1.
It's in the link above.
Fannie and Freddie Mac did not bankrupt the country although they did contribute to the problem by purchasing sub-prime loans that had already been issued by investment banks. Freddie and Fannie were under strict GSE lending guidelines for 30 year low down payment loans that they were responsible for recovering. Investment banks engaged in predatory lending to the sub-prime market, with teaser loans and adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) that they then deceitfully unloaded, via Collateralized Debt Obligations, into the stock market at valued assets, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act prevented SEC from overseeing the derivatives market. The market would not have allowed the purchase of the securities if they had been presented at face value, rather than being fraudulently presented. The repeal of Glass-Steagall Act at the behest of Citigroup during a time of imbecilic deregulation that prevented SEC oversight of derivatives and the contemptuous predatory lending in the sub-prime market caused the economic collapse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/09/AR2008060902626.html
None has gone to jail and the DoJ refuses to prosecute because there is a revolving door between it ,Wall Street banks, and the government -
http://chat.lawinfo.com/legal_question_regarding-t222989/index.html
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Investment banks made money based on volume and they issue the loans that brought down the house.
Fannie and Freddie contributed but they were not the cause.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/09/AR2008060902626.html
"Since HUD became their regulator in 1992, Fannie and Freddie each year are supposed to buy a portion of "affordable" mortgages made to underserved borrowers. Every four years, HUD reviews the goals to adapt to market changes.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton's HUD agreed to let Fannie and Freddie get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers.
In 2000, as HUD revisited its affordable-housing goals, the housing market had shifted. ... HUD restricted Freddie and Fannie, saying it would not credit them for loans they purchased that had abusively high costs or that were granted without regard to the borrower's ability to repay. Freddie and Fannie adopted policies not to buy some high-cost loans.
But by 2004, when HUD next revised the goals, Freddie and Fannie's purchases of subprime-backed securities had risen tenfold. Foreclosure rates also were rising.
That year, President Bush's HUD ratcheted up the main affordable-housing goal over the next four years, from 50 percent to 56 percent. John C. Weicher, then an assistant HUD secretary, said the institutions lagged behind even the private market and "must do more."
For Wall Street, high profits could be made from securities backed by subprime loans. Fannie and Freddie targeted the least-risky loans. Still, their purchases provided more cash for a larger subprime market. "
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You are confused, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased the garbage that the investment banks created but not the other way around. The investment bank loans represented the vast majority of sub-prime garbage and it remained fraudulently dumped into the stock market on unsuspecting investors -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae The market shifted away from regulated GSEs and radically toward Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) issued by unregulated private-label securitization conduits, typically operated by investment banks.
Investment bank securitizers were more willing to securitize risky loans because they generally retained minimal risk. Whereas the GSEs guaranteed the performance of their MBS, private securitizers generally did not, and might only retain a thin slice of risk. [33] Often, banks would offload this risk to insurance companies or other counterparties through credit default swaps, making their actual risk exposures extremely difficult for investors and creditors to discern. [34]
Following their mission to meet federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing goals, GSEs such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) have striven to improve home ownership of low and middle income families, underserved areas, and generally through special affordable methods such as "the ability to obtain a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with aThus, the shift away from GSE securitization to private-label securitization (PLS) also corresponded with a shift in mortgage product type, from traditional, amortizing, fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) to nontraditional, structurally riskier, nonamortizing, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), and in the start of a sharp deterioration in mortgage underwriting standards.[32] low down payment... and the continuous availability of mortgage credit under a wide range of economic conditions."
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I do not blame Fannie and Freddie as the principle cause of the collapse although they contributed and blame the principle cause on the predatory lending of the investment banks to the sub-prime market - they were not responsible for recovery of the loans they sold and dumped them through fraudulent means.
This is my reasoning -
"It is my opinion that you are responsible for the return of your own property.
There are people everywhere in want or need who would gladly borrow anything that you might lend them and they may or may not have any intention of returning your property.
And therein lies the problem; while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were responsible to recover their sub-prime loans and had strict 30 year fixed mortgage rates.
Alternately, investment banks with predatory lending and an ability to rapidly unload any responsibility for the recovery of the mortgage backed securities by passing, in addition, fraudulently soliciting them at other than face value to the stock market violates the first premise of who is ultimately responsible for recovery of loaned property.
I do not blame those who accepted the loans and teaser rates with adjustable rate mortgages, GSE agencies were restricted from doing it; hence, the principle blame to levy is against Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that allowed it to happen by its deregulation that consolidated commercial bank and investment bank services."
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You keep missing the point. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac underwrote sub-prime loans under strict lending guidelines, but they did not offer the teaser rates and adjustable rate mortgages - those were underwritten by investment banks!!
Investment banks fraudulently sold the sub-prime loans with ARMs to the stock market through Collateralized Debt Obligations as valued assets - not Freddie and Fannie. Fannie and Freddie purchased the slop that the investment banks had already issued. The market collapsed when interest rates rose on adjustable rate mortgages that should have never been issued to at risk borrowers. Glass-Stegall act prevented SEC oversight of the derivatives market.
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I do not support any political party.
The citation was lame - in fact rather pathetic for the discussion.
Investment banks brought the house down, they had access to vast capital and sold and over sold in the sub-prime market.
They are responsible and no amount of worming out of it will succeed.
Educate yourself - http://www.academicperspective.com/2009/10/19/an-american-financial-collapse-what-happened-on-wall-street/
If they did issue 80% it was at 30 year fixed rates. Alternately, investment banks would have issued 20% adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) - with predatory lending, solicited them fraudulently in the market to investors, and it was clearly enough to cause a catastrophe.
The directive to Fannie and Freddie to purchase investment bank trash did not help.
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Because nothing was illegal. The deregulation of the banks was authorized by the people.
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Agreed but if a salesman sells a nice LCD TV to people who ultimately can't pay the fees, is he guilty of something?
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So the fraud was at the rating agency level? If so, then yes I agree.
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Fraudulently presented? It was a product like any other..... the difference was that it was deemed low risk by virtue of its rating.
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"There are more than a few documentaries on how the information was presented to the ratings agencies to get the AAA rating."
No, first I hear of the method.
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Are you saying that the govt basically overrode the workings of the rating agencies?
If you can prove that, then we have ourselves a fraud case. Otherwise it's just conjecture.
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