How did Fannie and Freddie lose so much money? There are many reasons, but the two most important ones are Alt-A and interest-only loans, which generated most of the losses. These are not products for low or moderate-income borrowers. But they are products that invite fraud. Reports by the

There's one thing missing from the ethics charges issued against Maxine Waters: Facts. Neither the Office of Congressional Ethics nor the House Committee on Standard of Official Conduct has ever alleged facts that show that show Waters or anyone on her staff ever violated any rules or statutes. The fatal...

"Poor me!" decried Warren Buffett. "I'm forced to pay more income taxes than everyone else in my zip code! Why should everyone else get a free ride?"

Because of his affirmative action mindset, which measures tax burden according to headcount instead of income, he was unable to evaluate fiscal...

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as an honest case for extending the Bush tax cuts. Ten years of hard data prove they were a complete failure. They did not work while Bush was in office and they did not work during the...

You can't buy the kind of free publicity extended by Andrew Ross Sorkin in today's New York Times. Sorkin quotes extensively from Daniel Loeb's political rant in, "Why Wall St. Is Deserting Obama," a 1,200-word piece devoid of critical analysis.

Why is Wall Street deserting...

John Carney's New York Times op-ed piece is a tour de force, a paean to nonsensical thinking. In, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Too Big Not to Fail," Carney ignores the Fannie and Freddie of the real world. Instead, he goes after the Fannie and Freddie that exist...

The "special favors" performed by Maxine Waters' chief of staff were mundane tasks normally relegated to an administrative assistant or intern. Yet the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct inflated those actions into something more significant, namely the "crafting [of] legislation." You have to wonder who the Committee thought...

No wonder Maxine Waters demands a speedy hearing on the charges lobbed against her. The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct has seen this kind of stunt before, most notably when it accused Leo J. Wise and Omar Ashmawy of lying to Congress. Wise and Ashmawy are...

It's not hard to figure out why the allegations against Maxine Waters seem bogus. You simply need to read the 80-page House Ethics Report carefully. In order to concoct a case against her, the authors of the report twisted the meaning of the House Ethics rules and embellished...

Thomas C. Priore had a very impressive resume. Harvard B.A., Columbia M.B.A., fourteen years of structured credit investment and origination experience, and a 76% ownership stake in Institutional Credit Partners LLC, better known as ICP. Priore was also the President and CEO of ICP, which arranged and structured...

In June 2008, Goldman Sachs wasn't subject to the kind of regulatory scrutiny imposed on commercial banks. If it were, a government auditor would have asked a very obvious question: "What are you doing with half a trillion dollars in notional exposure to a hedge fund?" To characterize that dollar...

The weaknesses in the S.E.C.'s case against Goldman were always obvious. To win, the government needed to prove that Goldman lied, and that the lie mattered. The truth is that the bigger deceptions were not lies, but distractions. All the marketing materials and legal documents for Abacus 2007-AC1...

After he read a book that he didn't understand, David Brooks came up with another crackpot distortion of capitalism. This time, he finds a sharp contrast between bankers and hedge fund managers, whom he lumps together with all other business entrepreneurs. In his latest column he writes:

If Goldman Sachs wanted to reduce its exposure to subprime mortgage investments, why didn't it simply sell the assets it owned? Two reasons:

First, those large sales would have sent a signal that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and thereby pushed prices down further. That's how supply and demand...

Many is the time I would review a write-up of a new deal and scribble in the margins, "Get to the bleeping point!'' Unless you can articulate, up front, exactly what assets we would be lending against, and what circumstances would cause us to lose money (i.e. a quick-and-dirty breakeven...

John Paulson, the hedge fund investor behind the toxic CDO referenced in the S.E.C. complaint, ratcheted up his nobody-saw-it-coming rhetoric, with a letter nominally addressed to his own investors but clearly intended for a broader audience of ignoramuses and amnesia victims:

"It is easy to forget that...

"Although Goldman Sachs held various positions in residential mortgage-related products in 2007, our short positions were not a 'bet against our clients.'"

That claim, from Goldman's letter to its shareholders, is easily refuted. The S.E.C. has brought fraud charges on one of Goldman deals known as synthetic...

The Magnetar Trade was taught in the best business schools long before This American Life likened it to "Springtime for Hitler."

For those unfamiliar with the fraudulent scheme portrayed in Mel Brooks' classic movie and Broadway musical, The Producers, "Springtime for Hitler" was an enterprise specifically designed to...

A recent Bloomberg story about one of the CDOs insured by AIG, Davis Square Funding III, is a stark reminder of one of the bedrock principles of real estate lending: Timing is everything. Davis Square III, originally underwritten by Goldman Sachs, was comprised of pieces of mortgage bonds...

The merits of Obama's decision to allow drilling off parts of the East Coast and Alaska can be debated at length. But it will soon expose the dirty little secret known to everyone in the oil industry, that Newt Gingrich's mantra, "Dill Here, Drill Now, Pay...