Keith Hennessey, one of the four Republican commissioners on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has helpfully provided a copy of the Financial Crisis Primer the commissioners sent to the President and Congress. The commissioners sent the primer “to as best we can comply with the deadline in the law”, writes Hennessey in two different colors, adding:
It’s probably hopeless, but I want to encourage reporters to focus on our substance rather than our process.
Of course, this man who so values substance over process is the same person who voted against giving the FCIC more time to compile its report, on the grounds that doing so would violate “section 5(h)(1) of Public Law 111-21”.
What’s more, it’s hard to focus on any substance here when the primer is essentially 5,400 words of nothing much at all. There was a housing bubble. The US government was involved. So were the banks. There was a run on the banks. Which hurt the economy. That’s basically it. As advertised, the terms “Wall Street”, “shadow banking”, “interconnection”, and “deregulation” are nowhere to be found.
For this anodyne material, bereft of any insight, we’re paying something over $1,000 a word?
I did ask the FCIC today whether there’s any chance of them putting all their source material online; I haven’t heard back, but at this point it seems the only way to get any value at all out of the $6 million we’ve spent on this panel. A book will be published; it will be rubbished by Republicans; it will have no lasting impact. But give us that Goldman Sachs data dump, and we’ll discover so much more. Maybe not a financial-crisis smoking gun, but an unprecedented degree of access into the real inner workings of Wall Street. Now that would be valuable.
Back in November, Michael Perino said he wasn’t hopeful on this front:
Along with its report, the panel could release all the documents and interviews it has collected. The amount of material is staggering —800 witness interviews and millions of pages of documents. Making these documents available will allow independent analysts (in essence, an army of wiki-investigators) to draw their own conclusions from the data. It’s just what Angelides said he wanted the FCIC to do — lay out the facts for the American public and allow them to draw their own conclusions.
The prospects for immediate release of this material, however, seem slim.
Today, perhaps Phil Angelides has changed his mind a little. If he can’t release a definitive and bipartisan report, maybe he can go one better and release the actual facts he’s discovered instead.
It's a shame that the goddamned republican, on the board and in general, are shameless and are trying to rewrite the history before it can discredit them and their bankrupt world views.
And the advertised passage deserves more than a link,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/financial-crisis-panel-wall-street_n_796839.html
"The Republicans, led by the commission's vice chairman, former congressman and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Bill Thomas, will likely focus their report on the explosive growth of subprime mortgages and the heavy role played by the federal government in pushing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase and insure them. They'll also likely focus on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law that encourages banks to lend to underserved communities, these people said.
The Republicans' report is expected to conclude that government policy helped inflate the housing bubble and that prices weren't expected to crash because the government pushed homeownership so aggressively. They say that the report will note that once the bubble burst, a financial panic followed because firms weren't adequately prepared...
During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases "Wall Street" and "shadow banking" and the words "interconnection" and "deregulation" from the panel's final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal."
Especially since Brooksley Born was a lone voice warning about the instability these "banned from mention" derivatives caused.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
They have to know, as it has been documented over and over again, that the CRA had no role in the subprime market and that Freddy and Fannie had bought MBS's at the tipping point of the market, about 2007, after Wall Street had inflated it in the years previous. I guess I shouldn't be shocked that 'respectable' republicans like Douglas Holtz -Eakin would sign a document that "primes" one on the subprime economic collapse without mentioning Credit Default Swaps once, mentioning AIG only twice (never the financial products division), and mentioning NOTHING about the leverage of Consolidated Supervised Entities and the Christopher Cox manned SEC that forgot to to supervise them. It's sickening.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 16 Dec 2010 at 10:14 PM
Of course they know. Awesome.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/fannie-freddie-forked-tongue/
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 17 Dec 2010 at 08:02 PM
A fairly good set of questions to ask about this
farce"primer"http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/10-questions-for-gop-members-of-financial-crisis-inquiry/
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 17 Dec 2010 at 09:59 PM
The U.S. govt was not simply "involved." Govt policy is at the root.
Republican, Democrat, left, right: irrelevant. With very few exceptions, they all favor a policy that allows them and their industrial cronies to game the system at your expense.
#4 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Fri 17 Dec 2010 at 10:43 PM