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Today, David Wighton over at the Times Online referenced U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s quip that the U.S. Government had a bazooka ready to us in the case of the Frannie and Freddie Nightmare on Wall Street in saying:
Helping to stabilise the U.S. housing market should bring some benefit to British counterparts. It will also [...]

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Apparently, the answer is yes.
Thirteen “major” dealers of credit-default swaps agreed “unanimously” that the rescue constitutes a credit event triggering payment or delivery of the companies’ bonds, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News today. Market makers for the privately traded contracts will discuss how to settle them [...]

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If you are looking for the fallout from the Fannie and Freddie Nightmare on Wall Street, look no further than Gateway Financial and Midwest Banc. These two regional banks have nearly one-third of their tangible net worth tied up in GSE preferred stock, which is now worthless.On August 29th, Business Week reported that these [...]

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The U.S. government has finally stepped in to stop the bleeding. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant government sponsored enterprises have been taken into conservatorship and are now government property. As I consider this move a bankruptcy, I will add these two to my list of Global Banking Bankruptcies. These [...]

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A prediction I first broached here in May in my post Question: How is Fannie Mae a AAA company? is finally coming to pass: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are getting nationalized.
UPDATE: The U.S. Government takeover is now a done deal. See my post on the details of the merger with a [...]

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At the end of last week, the warning came. The Chinese officially warned Hank Paulson et al. that they better get their act together on Fannie and Freddie. The Chinese own a ton of GSE paper and they would be hopping mad to see their investments lose value.
The implicit threat is that the Chinese [...]

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Caroline Baum is one of the more insightful financial market pundits around. In her column she takes aim at Fannie and their private reward, public risk corporate setup. Basically, the Fannie-Freddie bailout is a simple case of “heads and management wins, tails and taxpayers lose.”

Two weeks ago, with their stock prices plummeting and [...]

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The day is almost over for the market (thank goodness) and it seems that financal service investors are in panic mode again. The market is down over 250 points and some shares in financial services are down over 15%. What gives?
As we may soon find out, non-market based economic solutions, like the infamous SEC [...]

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The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the housing bailout bill helping troubled mortgage borrowers, but also giving the U.S. Treasury Department a blank check to support Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The New York Times describes it this way:
Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and a primary author of the legislation, [...]

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Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) blasted Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who was giving the semiannual monetary policy report before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee today. His comments were the sharpest I heard throughout the hearing. The hearing is expected to be brief in order to make time for a later joint hearing with [...]