[CreativeMind]

Originally Posted by randolph

From Businessweek.
Community Reinvestment Act had nothing to do with subprime crisis

Lack of supervision fostered by the Bush administration was a major factor in the meltdown.

And a lack of supervision by the Obama administration -- or rather a willingness to look the other way, so these same bullshit low income ACORN type housing loans can continue -- is already poised to fuck the markets up even more, if not cause a complete repeat of history and set us up for yet another financial meldown, as once again Obama plays partisan politics and uses his power to inflate government and its role in home buying.

From the Wall Street Journal as well...

The government's move to ease the limits on the securities holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has ignited a debate among analysts about what the companies will do with their longer leash.

When the Treasury Department took over Fannie and Freddie last year, one of the requirements set for the companies required them to begin shrinking their portfolios of mortgages and related investments, which total a combined $1.5 trillion.

The idea was to rein in the companies' size and growth.

But last Thursday, the Obama Treasury Department quietly eased that restriction, meaning the companies now won't be forced to sell mortgages next year and instead can buy mortgages on the market, thus doing exactly the opposite of what they had been required to do. The Treasury also suspended for the next three years the $400 billion cap on the bailout subsidy that the government will offer. That could give them more flexibility to modify mortgages without worrying about taking losses.

Mahesh Swaminathan, senior mortgage analyst at Credit Suisse, said the firms could use their increased capacity to purchase delinquent loans from pools of mortgage-backed securities that they guarantee. Fannie and Freddie already purchase defaulted loans as they modify them under the administration's loan-modification program, but the additional breathing room means it is now a "slam-dunk for them to speed up" purchases of delinquent loans, Mr. Swaminathan said. New accounting rules that take effect next year also could make it more cost-effective for the companies to buy out bad loans and keep them in their investment portfolios.

"It's created a government-purchasing facility other than the Fed," said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, a research firm in Washington.

Meanwhile, a Freddie spokesman said the company will continue to use its investment portfolio as "an important tool" to "keep order in the housing and housing-finance markets." A Fannie spokesman declined to comment.

A Treasury official said the more generous portfolio limits were offered to avoid forcing the companies to actively sell their holdings, and they didn't intend for Fannie and Freddie to be active buyers of mortgages.

Ms. Petrou said that the recent moves "make sense in a short-term way because you avoid market volatility, but the prospect of limitless aid will make it harder to extricate Fannie and Freddie from the government."

"In a long-term way, it promotes nationalization of U.S. mortgage finance. We have increasingly gigantic, increasingly federal agencies eating up every mortgage out there," she said.