At least some people are trying to hold the line

This from the Financial Times via The Naked Capitalist…..

At a time when America, or at least Wall Street, needs a spineless hack as the head of a key agency, it is saddled with a credible man of principle: James Lockhart, OFHEO’s director. Yale graduate, Harvard MBA, lieutenant in the nuclear navy, risk management software entrepreneur, senior insurance executive, and former head of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. “A real hard-ass” in the words of a mortgage finance executive. It doesn’t seem as though he can be intimidated by the threat of being sent back to Plano, Texas, to work in his uncle’s car dealership.

Lockhart was appointed in the middle of last year to the directorship when there was no immediate, obvious cost to anyone of having a competent, effective regulator who actually knows what those buttons on his computer are connected to.

What is worse, his resistance to Fannie and Freddie ballooning their balance sheets and loosening their controls is reinforced by his experience in a previous job. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, a thinly capitalised government insurance operation, which charged inadequate premiums for covering beneficiaries of failed pension funds, was in turnround, as they say in Hollywood, during his tenure from 1989 to 1993. Lockhart had to clean up other peoples’ messes and one can guess he doesn’t want to do that again.