Selected writings by David Fiderer
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are irredeemable failures, which must be abolished as the first step in any type of housing finance reform — if current and former officials of the U.S. Department of the Treasury are to be believed. Going back to Timothy Geithner’s tenure as Secretary of the Treasury, and continuing to […]
To this day, I remain mystified by the widespread belief that Henry Paulson always tells the truth. To me it’s pretty obvious that the tail wags the dog in his recitation of events concerning the government takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Just about everybody accepts his story as the official record, which I […]
Edward DeMarco declared: "Restoring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not the solution." Except his job was to restore Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Calomiris and Haber embrace The Big Lie by tracing everything to Bill Clinton’s grand strategy of income redistribution as a response to economic inequality or as a sop to community activists at ACORN.
According Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and many other others, the moribund market for private-label residential mortgage-backed securities needs reviving. Well, nobody should not get his hopes up, for one simple reason. The math doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for 20 years. More precisely, the original premise of PLS has not stood the test of time. The […]
The Fannie Mae “accounting scandal,” is an especially timely parable to remind us how easily members of Congress and the media are bamboozled by an onslaught of doublespeak.
What was it about the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that caused problems in the first place? Critics' answers seem slippery, disconnected from empirical data.
Through bitter experience, bond purchasers learned about the moral hazard embedded in private RMBS and their grossly inadequate legal protections.