Free speech ... or the absense thereof ... FannieMae/FreddieMac Fraud

Everyone knows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entities that helped create a market for mortgage-backed securities, played a key role in last year's financial crisis. But the truth is, apparently, worse than that. It seems that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--the U.S. government, in effect--"routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A...." The much-reviled Wall Street bankers relied on those representations by agents of the federal government when they bought and sold securities backed by those misrepresented mortgages.