The link below contains a purported list of the top 25 in Congress who got contributions from the folks at Fannie and Freddie. Obama is listed third, after Dodd and Kerry, even though Obama is just a junior Senator. Obama is followed next by Clinton. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are on the list as well.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=16&artnum=1&issue=20080918
Then there is the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd who allegedly got special mortgage deals from Countrywide, who gave preferential rates to 'friends' of company's chairman.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25140560/
For an interesting article purporting to detail the House Financial Services Committee Chairs long history with Fannie Mae, See http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2008/20080924145932.aspx
"House Financial Services Committee Chair promoted GSEs while former 'spouse' was Fannie Mae executive."
The link below describes how some in Congress tried to use the original version of the bailout bill to divert money eventually recovered to groups like ACORN, a group Obama has a long association with. See:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122247015469280723.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
And then there is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who allegedly has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm.
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/oct/01/pelosis-pac-pays-bills-for-spouses-firm.
In Search Of The Tycoons Who Lost The Largest Fortunes
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The credit crisis has taken many barons of Wall Street (and their $10,000 suits) to the cleaners. Who, though, has suffered the biggest losses? One way to get at that question is to look at leaders of the hardest-hit companies, and how much the value of their in-house shares has fallen from recent peaks. We asked Insiderscore.com, which tracks executives' trades in the stock of their own companies, for the number of shares held by some Wall Street titans, and then crunched the numbers to see how far they've fallen.
In fourth place is James (Jimmy) Cayne, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns. Over the course of 2007, during which Cayne took extended vacations to play bridge and golf and purchased two Plaza hotel apartments for $28 million, investors' faith in the firm evaporated. Bear's stock, which traded as high as $170 in 2007, sank lower and lower until a bank run forced the Fed to intervene. In March 2008, JPMorgan Chase snapped up Bear for a bargain: $10 a share. Cayne sold his 5.8 million shares for $63 million, a loss of $850 million on their value the year before.
Third place goes to former CEO Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, who went down with the ship when the 158-year-old firm went bankrupt on September 14. His 10.8 million shares in LEH were worth about $882 million in June 2007. He recently sold a quarter of them for less than a quarter a piece; the remaining 8 million shares have a market value of less than $2 million. That makes for a total loss of more than $880 million.
Second-place finisher Joe Lewis is the only outsider on the list. The septuagenarian English currency trader never ran a big financial company—he merely made big bets on them. Starting in July 2007, Lewis bought a roughly 10 percent stake in Bear Stearns, at an average purchase price of $104 a share. He made his last stock purchase on March 13, 2008, less than a week before the collapse. Assuming he sold his shares for the takeover price of $10, his total loss comes to $1.1 billion.
The biggest losses by far, however, hit Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the former CEO of insurance giant AIG. Greenberg spent 38 years building the company into the world's largest insurer, until he was forced by AIG's board to step down in 2005. Through various trusts and holding companies, he controls about 11 percent of the company, according to Insiderscore.com, although it's impossible to know how much of that he owns directly. Between mid-2007 and now, the 95 percent fall in AIG's stock price wiped out at least $3 billion in Greenberg's personal wealth, and possibly as much as $7 billion.
None of these tycoons had all their wealth tied up in one company, and there may be many other financial titans who lost much more on various Wall Street holdings. Nor is anyone worrying about plutocrats going hungry just now. But by any measure, nine- to 10-figure losses have got to hurt. Perhaps too much to talk about: none of the men cited here returned NEWSWEEK's calls seeking comment on the accuracy of their estimated losses.
© 2008
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