In an interview, Freddie Mac’s former chief risk officer, David A. Andrukonis, recalled telling Mr. Syron in mid-2004 that the company was buying bad loans that “would likely pose an enormous financial and reputational risk to the company and the country.”
I left Freddie at the beginning of 2004. At that time, I believed that it excelled at mortgage underwriting--it had very serious people who constructed careful, sophisticated models of default prediction.
Dave A. was among the most highly respected people in the company. Apparently, things changed after I left.
3 comments:
u think of Tanta's evaluation of the article:
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/08/nyt-hit-job-on-freddie-mac.html
"No, but a former employee wrote a memo in 2004 that apparently didn't impress Syron all that much. A lot of us wrote memos in 2004 that didn't impress a lot of people all that much. I can relate to the urge to say "I tolja so." I'm not sure I can relate to the claim that if this one memo had been taken seriously, all this "crisis" could have been averted."
that's supposed to be "what do you think of..."
Freddie's response:
http://www.freddiemac.com/news/archives/corporate/2008/20080805_nytimes-article.html?eCORP
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