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 4/10 Good --- feeds.portfolio.com http://feeds.portfolio.com/portfolio/dailybrief
| A smart take on the day's business headlines with insightful commentary and a sense of humor. ... |
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 --- 45 days ago http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2008/07/23/inside-a-washington-
| Portfolio's Dan Golden has chronicled well the cozy connections in Washington D.C. that helped Angelo Mozilo build Countrywide into a mortgage giant. In today's Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot provides an unsettling look at the kind of the backlash he caught from executives, politicians and even Mozilo himself, when his editorial page wrote critically about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mozilo, always the gentleman, accosted him at a cocktail party and told him he didn't know what he "was talking about," and that he didn't understand "accounting or the mortgage markets," and accused him of being "in the pocket of Fannie's competitors." Charming enough on its own, but even worse in the wake of Portfolio's report that Mozilo's firm ran a V.I.P. mortgage program for politicians and bigwigs to curry favor with them. A few of the key players in that are now in the employ or the orbit of Fannie and Freddie. Gigot's piece names names about Wall Street analysts who complained to Dow Jones management about his Fannie and Freddie articles, which questioned the way the ungainly pair accounted for their derivatives positions. Among his public critics was George Gould, once a Treasury undersecretary for finance, who joined the Freddie board and was there when its "accounting lapses finally exploded into a scandal." Most importantly, perhaps, is that at the heart of the attack on Gigot was whether there was an implicit government guarantee on Fre ... |
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