Fannie Mae

Must Reads: Mark Thoma Economist's View: Things are Different at the Zero Bound Economist's View: It Wasn't Fannie, Freddie, or the CRA Bank Failures FDIC: Press Releases - Great Western Bank, Sioux Falls, South Dakota,…

The FDIC is out with its Quarterly Banking Profile for Q1 2010. And despite a rise in the FDIC's 'Problem List of Banks' to 775 in Q1 from 702 at the end of 2009 and 552 in Q3 2009, banks earned a ton of money – more than $18 billion in the…

This morning I attended a breakfast on financial reform hosted by the Agenda Project's Erica Payne. The purpose was to crystallize the issues most pertinent to the financial reform debate in these crucial weeks leading up to full Senate…

Embedded is a report by Thomas Ferguson and Jie Chen of the Roosevelt Institute which sought to determine the likely cause of the epic Scott brown victory in Massachusetts Senate Race. Their analysis points to economics as the overriding…

The federal funds rate has been creeping up in recent days.  At first, many dismissed it as a technical quirk.  In early February, the effective federal funds rate firmed to 14 bp as it did in early March.  However it did not…

Sheila Bair is a straight shooter. And as such, she laid it on the line today in her prepared remarks before Congress.  Her remarks were on the money on several counts. I will highlight just a few with commentary followed by the…

As a writer, Matt Taibbi is a lot more vitriolic than I am. He curses, makes some pretty over-the-top personal attacks, and divines a policymaker’s intent where I don’t think he can. But, this goes mostly to style.  Substantively…

The dust has settled a bit on the Treasury’s recent decision to give Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a green light to nationalize our mortgage problem. Calculated Risk says the move was not necessarily done on Christmas Eve to escape notice. And…

Before the Christmas break, I wrote a post to tie together my thoughts on why I have found the Obama economic program so unsatisfying despite some obvious success in stabilizing the economy. This first part framed the status quo as an…

Fannie Mae has the luxury of marking its accounts more accurately because they have no fear of being nationalized or going bust since they already have hit the wall.  So, when we read the latest quarterly results from Fannie Mae, we are not…