On August 5, 2008, The Village Voice ran a rather lengthy article on how Andrew Cuomo, as the youngest Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in our history, made a series of decisions that led to our current crisis (and bailout) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Among other things, the article states
"It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called "the gods of Washington" was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex-Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy." The article is complicated, but worth reading.
I understand that we need to do this bailout, despite the fact that it will cost all of us (and our children) a great deal of money, but we need to find a way to prevent this from happening again. It's time to tell Washington that they need to be more careful with our money. It's a shame that the cost of the bailout can't be paid for by the huge bonuses given to mortgage company executives during the time the foundation was being laid for the crisis in which we now find outselves, or better still, we could take the money out of the retirement accounts of the congressmen who passed the laws that allowed this to happen. The other thing to take notice of in this bailout is which politicians received sweetheart mortgage deals from the mortgage companies being bailed out.
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