.....that's good enough for me:

September 11th, 2003

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

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"WASHINGTON — Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

But the Dems had nothing to do with it!

And now Barney has the guts to ask us to trust him! Ha!

Waxman cut off Chris Shays because Chris wanted to include Fannie and Fredde in these hearings. Waxman is an arrogant fool!

Who controlled congress in that year?

Guess you must have missed the videos of Barney,Waters,meeks and a few more ranting about oversight! How quick you do forget.

answer the question.

I did answer the question of who stopped the regulation.You just do not want to admit it.

Democrats have been in charge for 2 years now What have they done to stop it? Not a thing,they are involved up to their eyeballs. So are Republicans!

How?

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We are here in Washington, D.C. to address problems. So I've set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010 -- million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) Five-and-a-half million families by 2010 will own a home. That is our goal. It is a realistic goal. But it's going to mean we're going to have to work hard to achieve the goal, all of us. And by all of us, I mean not only the federal government, but the private sector, as well.

And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington? Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that's too high, I'm not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don't have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I've asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.)

At the time, they weren't yet facing a financial crisis. What triggered their financial crisis was the decline in housing prices, and as of September 11, 2003, the housing market peak was still about three years in the future.

In fact, most traders agreed with Frank's assessment, at the time, since Fannie and Freddie stock continued to rise. About half a year after Frank's statement, Fannie stock was worth approximately 20% more than it was the day Frank said it wasn't facing any kind of financial crisis. That's a bull run. As late as mid October 2007 (four years and one month after Frank's statement), Fannie's stock value was STILL worth more than it was when Frank spoke.

Now, this all comes down to what standard we want to hold Barney Frank to. We can fault Frank for his lack of foresight, so long as we're willing to hold him to a standard where he's penalized for failing to recognize a financial problem more than four years before it became clear to the market as a whole, and about three years before the events that would precipitate the crisis happened. However, since I don't believe Barney Frank is a demigod, I won't indulge in judging him according to the standards of one. How about you?

If his name had been George Bush instead of Barney Frank, somehow I think you'd be a lot less likely to give him a pass.......

Frank contributed to this mess, there's just no way around that. Make all the excuses you want for him, it changes nothing.

I'm willing to consider that Frank contributed to this problem. But I'll need a specific argument about what he did to contribute, or what he failed to do that he should have done. It's not enough to argue by innuendo, by taking some five-year-old quotation out of context. Pointing out Frank's failure to predict an impending financial crisis at Fannie and Freddie, a good three to four years in advance of the crisis, is pretty weak criticism.

I'm not some reflexive Barney Frank defender. I just want to see a stronger case made against him, before I'll concede the point.