Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[malebaboon]

TII - yes, I attended the Nader shareholder roundtable. It was a good meeting, rainy and wet going in, nice chocolate croissants with orange juice on the catering table. I was also in a small group of four with Ralph Nader after the discussion for about ten minutes. He showed me a letter from Mel Watt in response to his letter, with a handwritten note from Director Watt in which he (Watt) said he looked forward to meeting with Nader and discussing the situation. I also spoke 1:1 with the Consumer Rights panelist, Ed Mierzwinski, after the meeting.

The major take-aways for me were that almost everyone agrees that Corker-Warner is a non-starter, though it has served to jump-start discussion. Surprisingly, there were not a lot of hedge-fund people there; there were a good number of regular folk, and also a lot of suits who seemed familiar with each other, also a lot reporters and writers in the room..

Also, the personal and political and emotional factors involved in this situation cannot be overstated. There is a lot of discussion on this board about numbers, fairness, etc, but those have very little to do with anyone close to this situation in Washington. Policy makers, public officials, and politicians in Washington, DC have very strong personal feelings about FnF going back twenty or thirty years, and it blinds them to matters of law and fairness. They really don't care, and there is NO sympathy for shareholders. They simply don't get that shareholder rights are important as a matter of law, one questioner (obviously known from previous discussions to the other panelists) even suggested that perhaps shareholders could be treated differently according to when they had purchased the stock! Ted Olsen almost laughed out loud, and soundly drubbed the questioner with scorn, and sarcastically suggested 'time-stamping' shares of stock, but very few in the room seemed to get it. Summing it up, Olsen's statement that calling someone a bad guy justifies the taking of his property, seems to wrap up the prevailing view of shareholders, we are considered 'bad' people: bottom -feeders, day-traders, greedy and wealthy hedge-fund sharks - not a single 'good' name was applied to shareholders, even Ralph made a differentiation between day-traders and other holders. It's pretty divisive.