THE TWO WOMEN WHO TOOK ON THE TOUGH GUYS

It may just be an coincidence, but we suspect not. The fiscal collapse was built on rampant and unchecked male machismo, with credit swapping substituting for mate swapping. And when you look to see who in official positions stood up to the pseudo tough guys, two names stand out: both women. Interestingly, the male dominated major media have given them virtually no attention.

Wall Street Journal, Oct 16 - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive steps to prevent Americans from losing their homes, highlighting a rift between her and other senior U.S. officials over terms of the $700 billion rescue package.

The government plan will help stabilize financial markets but it doesn't do enough to address home foreclosures, the root of the crisis, she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

"Why there's been such a political focus on making sure we're not unduly helping borrowers but then we're providing all this massive assistance at the institutional level, I don't understand it," she said. "It's been a frustration for me.". . .

Ms. Bair, who was nominated by the White House and confirmed by the Senate in 2006, has frequently said government and industry efforts to prevent foreclosures aren't effective enough. She has long defended her focus on consumer protection as an important role for the FDIC, which is charged with protecting bank deposits. . .

"I support all the measures; I've been a part of all the measures that have been taken," she said. "But we're attacking it at the institution level as opposed to the borrower level, and it's the borrowers defaulting. That is what's causing the distress at the institution level. So why not tackle the borrower problem?" . . .

Negotiations over details of the deal proved tense, with U.S. officials rushing to catch up with their foreign counterparts and the U.S. stock markets reeling. Last week, Ms. Bair met Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke and the two men tried to convince her to offer the debt guarantees to a broad range of institutions and a wide range of debt, according to people familiar with the matter. . .

Ms. Bair, a one-time Republican congressional candidate and children's book author, had suggested direct action to modify mortgages en masse before many other regulators in Washington. In April, she pitched a plan that would authorize the Treasury Department to make loans to as many as one million homeowners to minimize foreclosures. In July, after failed thrift IndyMac Bancorp Inc. reopened its doors under FDIC control, the agency said it would halt foreclosures on the mortgages it owned and would try to modify loans for struggling homeowners.

Her stance has led to tangles with government officials, including a disagreement with White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, a longtime colleague. She wrote a newspaper article about using government money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, without running it by the White House. Ms. Bair declined to comment on the exchange. "We are an independent agency, and we've been talking about this a long time," she said.

NY Times editorial - Bush administration officials have failed to deal effectively with the root cause of the financial crisis - unaffordable mortgages peddled during the housing bubble and the mass foreclosures that have followed. The only ray of hope is that worsening conditions may finally force them to act. At a hearing in the Senate Banking Committee, Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, confirmed that the F.D.I.C. is working with the Treasury to streamline the reworking of troubled mortgages. The aim is to make the loans affordable over the long term so that borrowers can avoid foreclosure and keep their homes.

Though details of the plan are not yet worked out, the outline calls for creating standardized criteria that would be used by mortgage servicers, the firms that handle collection and foreclosure proceedings for lenders and mortgage investors. Loans modified under the criteria would be eligible for a federal guarantee that would protect lenders and investors against default.

If the criteria are well established, defaults on the modified loans should not be a big problem. When the F.D.I.C. took over IndyMac Bank in California last summer, Ms. Bair established a streamlined program for 60,000 troubled loans from the failed bank. The program, which is yielding encouraging initial results, calls for modifications that lower a loan's interest rate, extend the life of the loan or defer payment on a portion of the principle. Taken together, the modifications lower the monthly payment to no more than 38 percent of the borrower's pretax income.

Katrina Vanden Heuval, Nation - More than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading -- was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. In fact, Greenspan, the man some affectionately called "The Oracle," spent his political capital cheerleading these disastrous financial instruments.

On Thursday, the New York Times ran a masterful and revealing front page article exposing the culpability of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers for the era of dangerous turbulence we live in. What these "three marketeers" -- as they were called in a 1999 Time magazine cover story -- were adept at was peddling the time bombs at the heart of this complex crisis: exotic and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives -- contracts intended to hedge against risk and whose values are derived from underlying assets. To cut to the quick, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers opposed regulating them. "Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalls Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve board member and economist at Princeton University, in the Times article.

In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency -- disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses.

Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. As the Times story reveals, Born's wise warnings "incited fierce opposition" from Greenspan and Rubin who "concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market." Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn't know what she doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. (A senior Commission director who worked with Born suggests that Greenspan and the guys didn't like her independence. " Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.")

In early 1998, according to the Times story, one of the guys, Larry Summers, called Born to "chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. But Born kept at it, unwilling to let arrogant men undermine her good judgment. But it got tougher out there. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress "to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations." (Levitt now says he regrets that decision.) Months later, the huge hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed -- confirming some of Born's warnings. (Bets on derivatives were a key reason.)

"Despite that event," the Times reports, " Congress (apparently as a result of Greenspan & Summer's urging, influence-peddling and pressure) "froze" Born's Commissions' regulatory authority. The next year, Born left as head of the Commission. Born did not talk to the Times for their article.

What emerges is a story of reckless, willful and arrogant action and behavior designed to undermine a wise woman's good judgment. The three marketeers' disdain for modest regulation of new and risky financial instruments reveals a faith-based fundamentalist approach to the management of markets and risk. If there is any accountability left in our system, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers should not be telling anyone how to run anything. Instead, Barack Obama might do well to bring back Brooksley Born and promote to his team economists who haven't contributed to the ugly mess we're in.