Fannie, Freddie Capital Concerns Prompt Paulson Plan
By Dawn Kopecki and Alison Vekshin
Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson decided to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after a review found the beleaguered mortgage-finance companies used accounting methods that inflated their capital, according to people with knowledge of the decision.
Paulson will hold a press conference at 11 a.m. today in Washington, according to a statement. Morgan Stanley, hired by the Treasury to probe the companies' finances, concluded the accounting, while legal, enabled Freddie, and to a lesser extent Fannie, to overstate the value of their reserves, according to the people who declined to be identified because the findings are confidential.
The Treasury plans to put Fannie and Freddie into a so- called conservatorship and pump capital into the companies, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said in an interview yesterday. The government would make periodic capital injections by buying convertible preferred shares or warrants, according to a person briefed on the plan. Paulson is seeking to end a crisis of confidence in the companies sparked by concern the companies didn't have enough capital to weather the biggest housing slump since the Great Depression.
The Treasury was ``convinced that the markets simply wouldn't respond until after something like this,'' said Frank, who was brief by Paulson. ``I think it's an important combination.''
Holders of the companies' common and preferred stock are ``very unlikely to come out of this at all happy,'' and the chief executive officers will be forced out, Frank said. Senior and subordinated debt holders will likely be protected, said other people who were briefed on the plan...
Critics including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Jeffrey Lacker have called for the companies to be nationalized. William Poole, the former head of the St. Louis Fed said in July that Freddie Mac is technically insolvent and Fannie Mae's fair value may be negative next quarter.....
“Thus, it should be understood that when pro-US figures use the term, 'rules-based international order,' they are not referring to anything analogous to the rule of law. Quite the opposite, they are using Orwellian language to describe a system in which essentially no rules can be established and/or observed, given that the dominant state has the prerogative to violate and/or rewrite “rules” at its whim.” Aaron Good, American Exception