Good Intentions?

The Congressional panel investigating the financial crisis wants to know if Freddie Mac and Fannie May were well intentioned or ridden with greed. “They were well-intentioned victims of a historic, unanticipated meltdown in the housing market — or they were reckless, arrogant financial firms that plunged headfirst into the riskiest mortgages in a blind pursuit of profits. The panel investigating the nation’s long financial crisis heard those two sharply divergent rationales for the failures of mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were seized by government officials in 2008 at a cost to taxpayers of $126 billion, to date. The third day of hearings into the subprime mortgage mess highlighted the difficult task of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in ferreting out the causes of the worst fiscal morass since the Great Depression.”