The Shrine

Actually, this guy just became CFO at the end of last year. I'm not sure that he had a tremendous amount to do with the policy that created the crisis...he was a career officer there, but I still don't know.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 9042201953

the Washington Post wrote:"He was previously senior vice president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer after starting at the company as an analyst."

Given the usual nondescript quality of corporate titles, who knows what he was involved in before he became CFO, but given that he only stepped into that job AFTER the government took heavy control of the company, I don't think it's necessarily fair to assume he's responsible for this. And in any case, Sine, that's pretty ghoulish of you.

the Washington Post wrote:Yet Kellermann has also figured in recent controversies at Freddie Mac. He and a group of company attorneys tussled with its regulator in early March as the firm prepared to file its quarterly earnings report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The group insisted that Freddie Mac inform shareholders of the cost to the company of helping carry out the Obama administration's housing recovery plan. The regulator urged the company not to do so, according to several sources familiar with the matter. An FHFA official contested that account, saying the regulator did not oppose disclosure but how the information was portrayed in the filing."

It sounds like he was fighting for GREATER disclosure in terms of the entire matter, not less, and that is somewhat above-board to me.

There is a very small part of me going "what if?", and far from calling it "a good start", that part wants to call it "suspicious". Just the tiniest part of my brain just wonders if this is someone who actually stepped up trying to fix the mess that others had created and gotten in the middle of fucking up other people's paper. I would not put money down on that theory if you put a gun to my own head, but there is a quite a bit of money at stake here, and a lot of unethical people involved in the equation at all levels of power.

Anyway, I highly doubt that's the case, but you want to look more deeply into this before you start dancing on the man's grave, Sine. If he was calling for greater transparency to the shareholders, that doesn't strike me as completely unethical. The guys who are really and genuinely responsible for all this have already stepped down, or are still serving on the Financial Services Committee or whatever it is in Congress. The worst this guy did is take a bonus, and that's bad, but if he really felt like he was trying to fix the mess it's somewhat understandable. I don't think bloodlust is necessarily the most humane response here, particularly when we don't know the details.

I heard this guy was under a lot of pressure because somebody is always angry him (not surprising for his position), and he was so worried that he asked for a security detail around his family. So it seems like he's just way too pressured.