"Prudent and Logical for the Banks That Sold This Toxic Waste to Buy It Back and for a Lot of People to Go to Prison"
MORTGAGE MELTDOWN Interest rate 'freeze' - the real story is fraud
Bankers pay lip service to families while scurrying to avert suits, prison
Sean Olender, San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 9, 2007
New proposals to ease our great mortgage meltdown keep rolling in. First the Treasury Department urged the creation of a new fund that would buy risky mortgage bonds as a tactic to hide what those bonds were really worth. (Not much.) Then the idea was to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy the risky loans, even if it was clear that U.S. taxpayers would eventually be stuck with the bill. But that plan went south after Fannie suffered a new accounting scandal, and Freddie's existing loan losses shot up more than expected.
Now, just unveiled Thursday, comes the "freeze," the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. . .
. . . The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worth…