Frankly Speaking

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Just occasionally, we feel as if we might be a little too harsh with Barney Frank. In the heat of the credit crisis and as TARP was being hurriedly drafted, Frank injected language to carve in eligibility for OneUnited, a middling Boston bank facing near imminent and ignominious failure. OneUnited got in trouble in the first place by being heavily invested in, you might have guessed it, Fannie and Freddie. The most dismaying part of our work here at Zero Hedge is often the self-realization that narratives like these simply no longer surprise us.  Neither do reports like the one recently issued by Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura which concludes, unsurprisingly, that connections to finance committee legislators and the Federal Reserve boards are a fairly reliable predictor for a bank's likelihood of sucking down TARP funds. Expect much more of the same.