Fannie Mae Asleep as Reports of Mortgage Crisis Mounted (For 2/5/12)

Nye Lavalle was a successful sports advertising executive who had a family home foreclosed on in 1995 and started investigating the home mortgage industry. He went all over the nation and discovered forged documents. He unsuccessfully showed his findings Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan, other Big Banks, and mortgage lenders. By 2003, when the housing market was hot, he had documented an extensive pattern of corruption at mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Taxpayers have lost $150 billion to the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which drove this industry's culture of outsourcing its work to other firms. Fannie Mae helped create an electronic registry firm for mortgages that it did not diligently oversee to ensure that it complied with state laws. These failures contributed heavily to hundreds of thousands of fraudulent foreclosures. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/mortgage-tornado-warning-unheeded.html?_r=1&hp