The person who is now in charge of counseling the current Secretary of the Treasury on what to do about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two conduits both of Federal government mortgage guarantees and of Federal government revenue from their continuing operations, has previous experience it seems. When he previously made his money in the financial sector, the same individual was in charge of a unit at a "huge asset manager." The current counselor's former employer, the huge asset manager, advised the Federal government on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sued the Federal government because the Federal government diverted Fannie's and Freddie's revenues to the Federal Treasury and away from the shareholders.
In their lawsuit, the shareholders requested many documents showing the analysis the advisers gave to the Federal government about whether and how Fannie and Freddie are profitable now and in the future. These are of course exactly the issues on which the Treasury counselor, well, now counsels the Treasury.
The Federal government understandably has refused to let those analyses see the light of day, or for that matter, let the shareholders see them.
Many questions come to mind now. Among them: Does it make any difference to that discovery dispute that the supervising consultant of "Fannie and Freddie's loss and capital projections" is now a counselor to Treasury on Fannie and Freddie's loss and capital projections?
Does it add anything that the current counselor helped to bundle mortgage loans for Fannie and Freddie to buy, which went south very badly. In fact, they performed so badly that the allegedly bad mortgage loans were one of the reasons that the Fannie and Freddie's Federal overseer, the Federal Housing Finance Administration, sued and settled for $1.25 billion?
Or that the company that bundled the loans and employed the current Treasury counselor and former consultant on Fannie and Freddie's finances, settled with the Department of Justice for $2.6 billion in large measure because of those mortgages? See Gretchen Morgenson, "Business Day / Fair Game / The Man in Charge of Fixing Fannie and Freddie Knows Them All Too Well" (New York Times Online, posted Friday, April 7, 2017), also available at https://nyti.ms/2oax0J3.
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