Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Execs Get Up to $6 Million in Pay
Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, December 24, 2009, 4:34 PM
Santa came early to these failed giants.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac execs made up to $6 million this year.
Breitbart reported:
The two chief executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could get paid as much as $6 million for 2009, despite the companies’ dismal performances this year which cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.
Fannie’s CEO, Michael Williams, and Freddie CEO Charles “Ed” Haldeman Jr. each will receive $900,000 in salary, $3.1 million in deferred payments next year and another $2 million if they meet certain performance goals, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
The pay packages were approved by the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie and Freddie.
That pay is far less than what their predecessors earned. Former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd received $10.2 million in 2008 and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron pocketed $13.1 million. Both execs were ousted when federal regulators seized the companies in September 2008. The federal government blocked exit packages for the pair worth up to $24 million.
Since then, Fannie and Freddie have needed $111 billion in taxpayer money to stay afloat, one of the most expensive aftershocks of the financial crisis.
So, will Obama lecture these execs in his weekly YouTube address?
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Alana commented:
Jim, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas!
Thank you for doing all that you do for all of us all year long.
2Brixshy commented:
Ah, so it was THESE fat cats president vanilli was put in office to take care of.
Good to know.
Just_Saying commented:
Everything that comes out of the federal government is corrupt. It’ll be interesting to see if Obummer stops this payola…
.
jonyjoe101 commented:
They should abolish these 2 organizations. They outlived there usefulness. Now it’s an acorn friendly corrupt quasi government embarrassment.
bg commented:
++
Billion-Dollar Scandal Not Ready for Prime Time
[Friends in High Places
Connections to the halls of power can make any story front-page news. Fannie Mae and Enron had no shortage of those. They employed two of the most generous campaign contributors in the nation. The media tried to link the leadership at Enron to the Bush administration and to several key figures in Congress. On the other hand, the broadcast media had nothing to say about the unambiguous connections between Fannie Mae board members and the Clinton administration.
Brian Ross of ABC’s “World News Tonight” told viewers during a Feb. 14, 2002, broadcast, “The Enron scandal is leading to new efforts to crack down on tax havens like the Caymans, efforts that previously faced strong opposition. Before becoming White House economic adviser, Larry Lindsey was one of the most outspoken defenders of such havens. At the same time, he also served as a consultant to Enron, earning $50,000.” In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, Ross tried to sell the concept of a sweetheart arrangement between the White House and Enron.
Tom Brokaw and David Gregory of “NBC Nightly News” also tried to exaggerate the connections between the Bush administration and Enron. On a Jan. 10, 2002, broadcast, Brokaw began: “Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay and his company have been some of the most generous contributors to President Bush during his political career, and Enron executives met six different times with Vice President Cheney or his staff as he was shaping the administration’s energy policy last spring. So the White House today was working hard to put distance between the president and this company’s troubles.”
Gregory characterized Enron as a “Texas powerhouse, as you say, in the energy business, whose leader has close ties to this president.” Gregory continued: “The political heat reaches the White House today as the president distanced himself from one of his top supporters and political contributors, saying Ken Lay, the Enron CEO who gave more than $200,000 to the Bush campaign and inaugural committee, didn’t have his ear when Enron was crumbling and didn’t get any favors from the administration.”
The following night, the tandem reprised the connections before concluding that they probably weren’t that big of a deal to begin with. Brokaw began: “Now to the White House where a good deal of this day was spent doing damage control over the widening investigation into the collapse of energy giant Enron.”
Gregory detailed several contacts between the Treasury and Commerce departments and Enron. While he conceded that “No action resulted from those calls,” he theorized that the White House didn’t have the time to hold up their end of the quid pro quo, “because the company fell too far, too fast for the government to have bailed them out.”
In contrast, neither NBC nor any other broadcast outlet would have needed to search hard for political ties in the Fannie Mae debacle. Former Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines and former Vice Chairman Jamie Gorelick were both instrumental figures in the Clinton administration. The print media were candid about Fannie’s political connections. In a Dec. 23, 2004, article, Albert Crenshaw of The Washington Post revealed that Franklin Raines “was a director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, and his name was mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary had Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) been elected president.”
Jamie Gorelick was Deputy Attorney General under Clinton. Fannie Mae board member Jack Quinn was the attorney for pardoned tax evader Marc Rich. Fannie also has one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington. A Feb. 24, 2005, article in The Washington Post reported that Fannie “paid its lobbying corps about $5 million in the first six months of last year.”
According to Jeff Bliss of Bloomberg.com, Fannie Mae spent almost $8.7 million on lobbyists in 2003. In May of 2004, Citizens Against Government Waste criticized Fannie for “heavy handed meddling in the legislative process to protect the company’s congressional protected status and its lavish corporate welfare program.”
The connections were there, but broadcast news was uninterested.
[..]
Gasparino agreed: “Right. It’s not related to George Bush. Franklin Raines, I believe, is a Democrat. So there is a degree here – because I’ve heard journalists talk about this – that hey, this is – there’s politics on the part of the Republicans. That’s why they’re beating up on Fannie Mae, which may be true. But, at the same time, this is a huge story, and it’s going overlooked.”
Sadly, this perception of political correctness is out of touch with reality. According to a September 2003 report by a GSE watchdog group,
Fannie Mae Policy Focus, Fannie lags far behind the market in facilitating housing for minority and first-time buyers. As a matter of fact, the GSEs buy less than 10 percent of private sector loans to first-time African-American and Hispanic purchasers. Moreover, Fannie and Freddie acquired “more loans made to absentee landlords, vacation homes, and second mortgages than first-time homebuyer loans,” according to the report.
It appears that very little of the implicit taxpayer subsidy to the GSEs is fulfilling that politically correct dream. This failure, compounded by an accounting scandal, should be red meat for story-driven TV journalists.
As the analysis proves, that hasn’t been the case.]
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No Man commented:
FNM/FHLMC (implicit US guaranty and 50% of new business had to be ‘low to moderate income’ home buyers) were, along with the Federal Reserve’s (low rates), the main causes of the Real Estate bubble which destroyed the economy. Both companies are bankrupt and being run under a conservatorship. There is no reason to pay anyone in either company more than government scale.
Frank Raines made over $14 million in one year. Rahm Emanual earned $46,000 an hour for board meetings. Neither know anything about banking or real estate finance. No need to wonder why they cost the economy $2 trillion.
Both GSE’s wasted ten of millions of dollars lobbying. Obama was the second most favored bribee in his short tenure in the Senate.
Worse yet the Fed is feverishly buying (with prinbted federal reserve notes) hundreds of billions of dollars wor of defaulted mortgage backed securities.
Health decontsruction is a distraction. The end of the private sector is nearer than you realize.
Freddy commented:
This is so crazy! Fannie and Freddie are NOT engaged in utting edge business ventures that require ANY sort of high powered executives. In fact, these companies are better served by honest people making much less money. There is virtually NOTHING new in the mortgage business! NOTHING!
IF there are any government ‘funded’ organizations that require NOTHING beyond the $500,000 exec salary, as limited by the Barney Franks of the congress, Fannie and Freddie are those companies!
wanumba commented:
Contrast this with Obama telling private banks they couldn’t pay their people bonuses and setting executive pay.
It’s just part of the world’s biggest robbery, ever.
Guitanguran commented:
Well, you get what you pay for. Whatever you think of Fannie or Freddie, you either get the best you can find at what the market allows, or not.
Ricky Vines commented:
Freddiemac lost what it did and blew the housing bubble because the Democrats asked its executives to purchase risky loans in an effort to enable home ownership to constituents with bad credits. Freddie has the most accurate risk assessment programs and processes but were forced to ignore those. If Freddie stayed within their risk tolerance then it would not sink the way it did.
bg commented:
++
posted this sampling in another thread,
might as well post it in here too..
It’s not related to George Bush.
Bush Called For Reform of Fannie Mae
& Freddie Mac 17 Times in 2008 Alone
Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie
Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis
Obama Sued Citibank Under CRA to Force it to Make Bad Loans
Obama Videos from the Wayback Machine
three pages worth!! (thumbsup)
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