Talen om Fannie Mae og Freddie Mac, som præsident Barack Obama desværre ikke holder

William McGurn har i dag en tale til nationen om Fannie Mae og Freddie Mac i WSJ (22/6), som præsident Barack Obama burde holde, men nok næppe kommer til at holde. McGurn foreslår, at Obama skruer bissen på i forhold til de to halvoffentlige realkreditinstitutter, som han nu har gjort det overfor BP. De to institutter er mere end andre finansielle virksomheder ansvarlige for at trække USA og verden ud i en finanskrise p.g.a. dårlige boliglån.

McGurn foreslår, at Obama fortæller nationen i en direkte TV-tale fra det ovale værelse i Det hvide Hus:

"Think of these bad loans as a nasty leak polluting our financial system. While most other large financial firms either have failed or are now recovering, the damage caused by Fannie and Freddie continues largely unabated. The Congressional Budget Office says that plugging these bad loans has already cost taxpayers $145.9 billion, making them the single largest bailout of all.

Make no mistake: We will fight Fannie and Freddie with everything we have got for as long as it takes. We will make these two government-created companies pay for the damage they have caused. In fact, we are going to make Fannie and Freddie pay with their lives. Tonight I'd like to lay out our battle plan going forward:

First, the cleanup. For more than three decades there's been a culture of corruption in the regulatory oversight of these companies. I inherited a situation in which these firms lobbied and captured their regulators. Fannie and Freddie's privileged place in the market was sustained because they were a source of riches for Washington's Republican and Democratic establishments. Even today we see this oily alliance at work in the recent decision by Congress to exempt Fannie and Freddie from their financial reform bill.

Tonight I promise you: We will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to change this.

One of the lessons we've learned from Fannie and Freddie is that you cannot combine private profit with taxpayers bearing risk. For decades we've propped up Fannie and Freddie's near monopoly. And for decades we have failed to face up to the fact that homeownership is not the best path for everyone. Time and again, reform has been blocked by former congressmen of both parties whom these companies hired to spread the money around and persuade Congress to back off.

So the second thing I will do is meet with the chairmen of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And I will tell them the day of reckoning has come. We are going to break up Fannie and Freddie and end the privileges they enjoy from the government."

.....

"The financial crisis was not caused by Fannie and Freddie alone. But fixing them is essential. To this important task, we bring hope, which comes from the confidence that free men and women in a free economy will in the end make better decisions than any government. And tonight we revive that hope by delivering change to two of the fattest cats Washington has ever known."