Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Look through President Barack Obama’s proposed 2011 budget, and you’ll see a line calling for a $235 million increase in the Justice Department’s funding to fight financial fraud. Lucky for them, the people who wrote the budget can’t be prosecuted for cooking the government’s books.
Whether on Wall Street or in Washington, the biggest frauds often are the perfectly legal ones hidden in broad daylight. And in terms of dollars, it would be hard to top the accounting scam that Obama’s budget wonks are trying to pull off now.
The ploy here is simple. They are keeping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac off the government’s balance sheet and out of the federal budget, along with their $1.6 trillion of corporate debt and $4.7 trillion of mortgage obligations.
Never mind that the White House budget director, Peter Orszag, in September 2008 said Fannie and Freddie should be included. That was when he was director of the Congressional Budget Office and the two government-backed mortgage financiers had just been seized by the Treasury Department.
The White House is already forecasting a $1.3 trillion budget deficit for 2011, which is about $3 of spending for every $2 of government receipts. By all outward appearances, it seems Obama and his budget wizards decided that including the liabilities at Fannie and Freddie would be too much reality for the world to handle. So they left the companies out, in a trick worthy of Enron’s playbook, except not quite so hidden.
New Beginning
While the president had nothing to do with the mortgage zombies’ collapse, this was supposed to be the administration that, in his words, would put an end to “the era of irresponsibility in Washington.” Instead, he has provided us a new beginning.
Fannie and Freddie aren’t merely wards of the state. Practically speaking, they are the entire U.S. housing market. Their liabilities are the government’s liabilities. As Orszag said at a Sept. 9, 2008, news conference, two days after Fannie and Freddie were seized: “The degree of control exercised by the federal government over these entities is so strong that the best treatment is to incorporate them into the federal budget.”
That control is stronger today. Congress and the Treasury have given the companies a blank check to blow through whatever taxpayer money is necessary to keep the U.S. housing market afloat. Anyone buying large quantities of U.S. government bonds knows these liabilities exist. So why pretend they don’t?
Making Fudge
Obama’s White House didn’t invent this kind of fudging. President George W. Bush, for example, kept most war costs out of the budget. Obama’s proposal shows about $289 billion of war costs for 2010 and 2011, plus a $50 billion placeholder estimate for each year after that. Those dollars are small compared with the numbers at Fannie and Freddie, though.
Without federal backing, the mortgage guarantees issued by Fannie and Freddie might not be worth much. In that case, the $973 billion of mortgage-backed securities held by the Federal Reserve would be worth substantially less, rendering its $52 billion capital cushion illusory. Of course, it’s ridiculous to think the government would let this happen.
Excluding Fannie and Freddie, the national debt held by the public is about $7.9 trillion. With them, it exceeds last year’s $13.2 trillion gross domestic product. Even the geniuses at Moody’s Investors Service are warning that the country’s AAA rating might not last. No country can owe more than its yearly productive output for long without giving up its accustomed lifestyle and influence.
Catching On
The nation’s debt has become so immense that it’s corroding the government’s fundamental relationship with its own people. Put yourself in the shoes of a young couple thinking of buying their first home. The government needs folks like them to buy into the market to keep demand for houses up.
Yet without all the trillions of dollars of subsidies the government has pumped into housing, home prices would get creamed even worse than they already have, spurring greater loan defaults and saddling the Treasury with ever-higher costs from the guarantees Fannie and Freddie sold. What’s sickening is that the government can’t afford the subsidies. Suddenly, that $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers looks like a nasty teaser aimed at sucking America’s newlyweds into a giant Ponzi scheme.
Worst of all is the example the government is setting for its citizenry. There still have been no indictments of senior executives at any of the big financial institutions that cratered in 2008 while sporting pristine balance sheets. No wonder. The government lacks moral standing to prosecute crimes such as accounting fraud when its own books lack integrity.
And how does Orszag explain his about-face on including the government-sponsored enterprises in the federal budget? Here’s the response I got in an e-mail from Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget: “The relationship between the GSEs and the federal government is in flux. Until it is settled, it would be too disruptive to change how they are accounted for in the budget.”
That didn’t answer my question. (Are we supposed to believe the relationship wasn’t “in flux” in September 2008 after Fannie and Freddie got seized?) So I asked again. Baer replied: “Our statement is our statement.”
It speaks volumes, too, confirming what we otherwise could only surmise: They don’t have a good explanation.
(Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
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