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The US Government Takes Over Private Corporations and the Public ? Yawns

By J. Michael McBride

“Uncle Sam has just become the 800 pound gorilla in the U.S. mortgage market. The Bush administration's announced Sunday it was seizing troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) in a bid to help reverse a prolonged housing and credit crisis.

…

Officials announced that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being placed in a government conservatorship, a move that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said allowing the companies to fail would have extracted a far higher price on consumers by driving up the cost of home loans and all other types of borrowing because the failures would "create great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe."

…

The conservatorship will be run by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the new agency created by Congress this summer to regulate Fannie and Freddie, a move taken at the same time that Congress greatly expanded the power of the Treasury Department to make loans to the two companies and purchase their stock.

…

In addition, officials said the Treasury Department plans to purchase $5 billion in mortgage-backed securities issued by the two companies later this month, the first of a series of purchases planned by the government in an effort to bolster for these securities, which was badly shaken a year ago when the credit crisis first erupted with soaring defaults on subprime mortgages.

Paulson said that it would be up to Congress and the next president to figure out the two companies' ultimate structure and the conflicting goals they operated under - maximizing returns for shareholders while also being required to facilitate home buying for low- and moderate-income Americans.

"There is a consensus today ... that they cannot continue in their current form," he said.

Here is a link to that article:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080908/D932GH280.html

Of course, as with any good corporate bail out (now take over) of a terribly weak company, there is the pay off for the insiders who got the company into the mess it is in. This situation is no different, so while the top exec’s at Fannie and Freddie are being replaced, they will stay on as consultants and of course will get a nice paycheck for leaving.

“Potentially, Mr. Syron could walk away with an exit package totaling as much as $15 million, said David Schmidt, a senior consultant at James F. Reda & Associates LLC, a compensation consulting concern in New York. That includes a pension and deferred compensation, about $3.7 million in severance pay and a possible payment of $8.8 million to compensate for forfeiting recent equity grants. A Freddie spokesman said Mr. Syron had said he doesn't "anticipate receiving nearly that much."

Mr. Mudd's exit package, including stock he already owns, could total $14 million, Mr. Schmidt estimates. That includes $5 million in pension and deferred compensation, $4.2 million in severance pay and $3.4 million of restricted stock, based on Friday's closing price. The value of that stock could fall sharply, however.”

These 2 quotes above are from another good article out of the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122079276849707821.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news

From an article entitled “Saving the People's Bank of China Who the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout is really supposed to help.”

"And as doubts about the viability of Fannie and Freddie grew, foreign central banks suddenly found themselves massively exposed. With the agencies needing to sell billions of dollars of debt on a weekly basis, and with the U.S. institutions lacking capital, proper deference had to be paid to the foreigners. The U.S. government had to protect their GSE investments. Paulson & Co. face an extra burden because foreign investors have been so badly burned by the U.S. financial sector. When sovereign wealth funds began buying chunks of Wall Street firms after they had imploded, Paulson repeatedly trumpeted those purchases as international votes of confidence. But those investments have been disastrous for the foreign purchases, as Asian and Persian Gulf authorities have lost billons on the Blackstone Group, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and others investments.

The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be sold and marketed as an effort to shore up the U.S. housing market. Maybe so. But it is mostly meant to shore up our damaged international financial standing, preserving leadership and making sure the U.S. Treasury Secretary doesn't get tarred and feathered at the next G-8 meeting.”

Here is a link to that very informative article:
http://www.slate.com/id/2199564/

Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).