Fannie Mae: Sen. Mark Warner: Bureaucrats over Shareholders by Investors Unite
Sen. Mark Warner: Bureaucrats over Shareholders
Virginia Senator Mark Warner has been crisscrossing the state campaigning hard for re-election. He talks about all the good things he’s done for Virginia – the federal dollars he’s brought back to the state, his support for programs and policies that he says will make Virginians lives better, as well as the direction he wants the state to head in the future.
In other words, typical campaign rhetoric when someone doesn’t want to talk about what they’ve really done. And what has Sen. Warner done?
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Residential ObamaCare.
From a Weekly Standard piece:
“It’s hard to understand why legislators think that government can restructure this one-sixth of the economy any better than they are restructuring the one-sixth represented by health care.”
Sen. Warner is, of course, one of the main proponents of the Corker-Warner housing reform bill that does not uphold the rights of shareholders in its attempt to restructure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Instead of returning Fannie Mae / Federal National Mortgage Assctn Fnni Me (OTCBB:FNMA) and Freddie Mac / Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp (OTCBB:FMCC) to full profitability with better safeguards, Corker-Warner effectively tosses the baby out with the bathwater. More from The Weekly Standard:
“In going through contortions to reinvent the housing finance system, the senators have avoided the obvious solution: keep the basic platform that has generally served American homeowners well but reform it to reduce risks. Instead, Johnson and the others have come up with a contraption that resembles the Affordable Care Act in its convolutions and its potential for unintended consequences.”
We’re not so sure about the “unintended consequences” part. The ink was barely dry on the papers forming the conservatorship before Treasury bureaucrats started twisting it to their own designs. And elected officials like Mark Warner, when they saw they would have to choose a side, chose to stand with the bureaucrats instead of their constituents. We don’t know how many Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac investors live in Virginia but it’s inevitable, given the overall numbers of investors, of which there are thousands.
So it raises the question: how many of those investors aren’t aware of the full extent of Sen. Warner’s betrayal of them and are considering voting for him? Warner-Corker as the predecessor to Johnson-Crapo is losing steam, but make no mistake, neither of those bills protects shareholders; in fact, both eliminate shareholder rights and will continue to hold Fannie Mae / Federal National Mortgage Assctn Fnni Me (OTCBB:FNMA) and Freddie Mac / Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp (OTCBB:FMCC) captive by bureaucrats.
Look at it this way, Virginia voters: every vote cast for Mark Warner is a vote against the rule of law and against the possibility of preserving and restoring shareholder rights.