The sale of billion of dollars of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock in 2007 and 2008 was accomplished by fraud on unsuspecting public investors and the complicity of mortgage originators that bought the shares knowing they were poison, according to attorney and professor Seth E. Lipner in his July 7th Forbes article entitled “How Fannie And Freddie Unloaded Their Trash.”
Recently released figures show that colleges across the nation suffered a 19 percent decline in their endowments in 2009. Some school endowments have reported even steeper declines, including Georgia Tech (26%), the University of Georgia Foundation (23%), and Emory University (21%). While the financial markets as a whole experienced a significant downturn in 2008, the stock market began rebounding in early 2009 and many investment portfolios have since regained much of their value—but not all. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Emory has had to cut its expenses by $50 million a year and eliminated 500 administrative positions, despite having one of the richest endowments in the country. Smaller schools with more modest endowments are in a more precarious position, because a single bad investment may threaten the very survival of the institution.
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The first public hearings by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission were notable for what did not happen. The well-prepared Wall Street bankers faced the cameras with apparent humility, parried Commission clunkers with their own platitudes, and left pretty much unperturbed. Those who expected the reprise of the 1930s Pecora hearings must have been disappointed. “Pecora’s revelations enraged the public and stampeded Congress into creating the SEC and separating commercial banks from investment banks,” according to Paul Wiseman in his USA Today column, “Depression-era star muckraker shapes Wall Street inquiry.” He added: “In public hearings, Pecora squared off against the elite financiers of the age, pointing at them with his cigar and coaxing them into what [Senate historian Donald] Ritchie calls ‘startling admissions of wrongdoing.”
In an encouraging sign to those who despair about investors receiving full justice in a compulsory arbitration process financed by the brokerage industry, a California FINRA panel last month (December 2009) awarded compensatory damages of $319,798 to a 96-year old investor as well as treble damages of $959,394 under the California Elder Abuse Act.
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