The mortgage crisis?

"Fannie Mae was founded as a government agency in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal to provide liquidity to the mortgage market. For the next 30 years, Fannie Mae held a virtual monopoly on the secondary mortgage market in the United States.

In 1968, to remove the activity of Fannie Mae from the federal budget, it was converted into a private corporation. Fannie Mae ceased to be the guarantor of government-issued mortgages, and that responsibility was transferred to the new Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae)
."

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_National_Mortgage_Association[/ame]

"Freddie Mac's primary method of making money is by charging a guarantee fee on loans that it has purchased and securitized into mortgage-backed security bonds. Investors, or purchasers of Freddie Mac MBS, are willing to let Freddie Mac keep this fee in exchange for assuming the credit risk, that is, Freddie Mac's guarantee that the principal and interest on the underlying loan will be paid back regardless of whether the borrower actually repays.

Both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have spoken publicly in favor of greater regulation of the GSEs, because of the size of their holdings and the widespread perception that they are government backed. Freddie Mac is currently regulated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
"

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Home_Loan_Mortgage_Corporation[/ame]
 
Here's something really scary - McBush might be even more confused than the original. Check this out, grandpa is defending a country that has not existed since 1993:

At a press availability today, John McCain expressed concern about relations between Russia and a country that hasn't existed for quite some time. According to a rough pool report transcript, he said:

"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern."
Czechoslovakia, of course, split into two separate countries in 1993.

It isn't the first time McCain has made this mistake, as TPM's Greg Sargent points out:

Around three months ago, McCain told Don Imus that he would "work closely with Czechoslovakia and Poland and other countries" to install the European Missile Defense System in Poland, according to the Democratic National Committee. (The slip-up was referenced elsewhere, too.)

And during a GOP debate in October 2007, McCain said: "The first thing I would do is make sure that we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and I don't care what his objections are to it."


There are more: in 1994, McCain suggested NATO be expanded to include Czechoslovakia. At a dinner in 1999, he "twice thanked the ambassador from 'Czechoslovakia' for his efforts," according to the Washington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/mccain-references-non-exi_n_112650.html
 
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