Franklin Raines
Fannie Mae
JANUARY 10, 2005
On Labor Day, he was a favorite to be Treasury Secretary should John Kerry win the White House. At yearend, he had left under a cloud. The charmed career of Franklin D. Raines -- a poor kid from Seattle who climbed through Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship to become White House budget director and CEO of Fannie Mae (FNM ) -- crashed to a halt on Dec. 21. That was six days after the Securities & Exchange Commission's top accountant declared that mortgage giant Fannie misstated earnings for 3 1/2 years, leading to an estimated $9 billion restatement that will wipe out 40% of profits from 2001 to mid-2004.
Supporters of Raines, 55, insisted that he wasn't culpable for Fannie's misuse of obscure accounting standards. But that argument didn't wash. Raines was in charge in 2001, when Fannie chose to create what the SEC dryly called "its own unique methodology" to calculate the earnings impact of its trillion-dollar portfolio of derivatives. Raines gave Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard free rein and tolerated "weak or nonexistent" financial controls, according to a scathing report issued in September by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Fannie's regulator.
Worse, the CEO failed to manage the scandal. When sibling Freddie Mac's accounting first came under fire in mid-2003, Raines's arrogant insistence that Fannie was above reproach spurred OFHEO to do a white-glove examination. And when that uncovered the improper bookkeeping, Raines insisted on an SEC review, which he maintained would vindicate Fannie. "Frank was supposed to be the great political risk manager," says independent banking analyst Bert Ely in Alexandria, Va. "Instead, he compounded the problems."
When Fannie's board balked over ousting Raines, OFHEO forced its hand. Raines described his exit as an "early retirement' that was self-initiated and says that it shows he was accountable for the SEC findings. Fittingly, Raines -- a man who built a $54 billion behemoth with his mastery of behind-the-scenes politicking -- went down spinning.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_02/b3915646.htm
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, federal officials said yesterday in a report that portrayed a company determined to play by its own rules.
Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, in announcing a settlement with Fannie Mae that includes $400 million in penalties, provided the most detailed picture yet of what went wrong at the congressionally chartered firm.
They portray the District-based mortgage funding giant -- a linchpin of the nation's housing market -- as governed by a weak board of directors, which failed to install basic internal controls and instead let itself be dominated and left uninformed by chief executive Franklin Raines and Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard, who both were later ousted.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said there are no plans to use his new authority to inject capital into mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which both posted worse-than-expected earnings last week.
``Given that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are solely involved in housing, that's their sole business, and given the magnitude of the housing correction we've had, it's not a surprise to me to see those losses,'' Paulson said.
Shares Plunge
Shares in Fannie and Freddie have plummeted more than 80 percent this year on concern they don't have sufficient capital to withstand record foreclosures on the $5.2 trillion of mortgages they own or guarantee.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aULVZ2mAF9es&refer=home
He served in the Carter Administration as associate director for economics and government in the Office of Management and Budget and assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff from 1977 to 1979. Then he joined Lazard Freres and Co., where he worked for 11 years and became a general partner. In 1991 he became Fannie's Mae's Vice Chairman, a post he left in 1996 in order to join the Clinton Administration as the Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he served until 1998. In 1999, he returned to Fannie Mae as CEO, "the first black man to head a Fortune 500 company."[3]
During a 2008 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the financial crisis, including in relation to the Community Reinvestment Act, asked if the CRA provided the "fuel" for increasing subprime loans, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines said it might have been a catalyst encouraging bad behavior, but it was difficult to know. Raines also cited information that only a small percentage of risky loans originated as a result of the CRA.
No comments:
Post a Comment