WOW Shlaes Reveals the Behind the Scenes Muscle that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Used Against Major Newspapers (And the New Muscle Emanating from Paul Krugman)

The Other Bubble
By Amity Shlaes

Back in the late 1990s and right up to 2007, journalists occasionally wondered about two big enterprises called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie had come out of an obscure period of American history, the New Deal. Freddie had been created more recently, but no one could explain quite how. The official job of the pair was to provide liquidity in the housing sector in various ways, including creating a secondary market in securities backed by mortgage loans. Whatever Fan and Fred did, their form seemed a contradictory hybrid: On the one hand they were “private.” On the other hand their bonds sold at a premium over other bonds, suggesting that the Treasury or the Fed would always bail them out. These “government-sponsored enterprises,” as they were known, were both growing. Logic suggested that the more they grew, the more bailing them out would rattle markets.

Yet if a reporter took a stab at explaining these mystery entities in a story, or even merely spotlighted them, that reporter paid for it. Fannie and Freddie’s big executives, credentialed power brokers from both parties, hopped on the Shuttle and came to New York to bully the newspaper into shutting up. The executives suggested the journalists weren’t bright enough to appreciate the financial mechanics of Fannie or Freddie. This brazen effort at intimidation was unusual. Even senior editors could recall nothing like it — unless they were old enough to have met with a Teamster.
Those writers who experienced this finger-wagging and strong-arming in the conference room will never forget the queasy feeling they engendered. Fannie and Freddie’s lobbyists did not succeed in muzzling big news. From time to time, even after such a visit, editors ordered up and reporters wrote articles probing the GSEs. But when it came to big, sustained investigations, most newspapers turned to easier topics. When, much later, Fannie and Freddie proved to have been ticking time bombs and set off the financial crisis, the reporters told themselves that the very blatancy of the effort to intimidate should have tipped them off. They vowed to respond differently should that queasy feeling ever return.

Well, queasy is back. And this time, the strong arm belongs not to the boss of the company, Janet Yellen of the Fed, but to a media supporter, Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Unlike the old Fan and Fred execs, Krugman isn’t administering his punishment in the privacy of a conference room but rather in his columns and blogs.

Read the rest here.