Barney Frank has decided to retire from Congress. That is a good thing. Now for the bad news. The Democrats likely replacement is Maxine Waters. It’s like they want to take incompetence to a new level.

Here is what Congresswoman Waters had to say about Fannie Mae and their now disgraced ex-chairman Franklin Raines in a 2003 Congressional hearing:

We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines

I’m sure you know about the housing crash (that Democrats blame on Republicans), but do you know about Frank Raines. Under his leadership, Fannie Mae was caught in an accounting scandal that makes Enron look like child’s play. When they were finally audited by those dumb Republicans, it was found that they had overstated their profits from 2001 to 2004 by 40%…$9 billion dollars. He is also the guy who started a pilot program at Fannie Mae in 1999 to push sub-prime mortgages.

Back before the crash, this is how the New York Times described it:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings. (link)

In the same 1999 article, a conservative organization warned:

From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.

So how did they push this through…again from the 1999 article

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

And Maxine Waters is the Queen of the Race Card, and it doesn’t end there.

Maxine Waters is also under an ethics violation investigation for steering bail out money to a bank that she had a financial interest in (her husband was on the board). Her defense? Racism of course.

I’ve said it many times before. Incompetence and arrogance are a deadly mixture.

 

 

 

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