Can we blame Fannie again?
What did the ‘Friends of Angelo’ know and when did they know it? I know it’s not respectable to blame Fannie Mae for the financial meltdown. I understand that the Wall Streeters who oversold toxic securities bear much of the blame. But I don’t understand why the Justice department’s civil lawsuit against Bank of America for “brazen” mortgage fraud doesn’t put Fannie Mae back in the center of the vortex of culpability.

Bank of America is on the hook because it’s now owner of Countrywide Financial, (formerly headed by Angelo Mozilo, who liked to shower favors on powerful politicos like Dem bigshot and former Fannie CEO Jim Johnson). If I read the allegations in the stories correctly, Fannie bought up Countrywide’s crap mortgages (from which internal controls had been removed) and then repackaged them into securities for sale–laundering and legitimizing them, in effect, for Wall Street to then spread around.

This enabled Countrywide to gin up more crap mortgages....