http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/07/fannie...

The Morgenson/Rosner story is a simple and easily grasped one. It is made for campaign ads. The Great Villain, the man who almost ruined America according to the book, is James Johnson, long one of the most important members of the Democratic establishment. He ran Walter Mondale’s campaign. He chaired John Kerry’s search for a vice-president — the brilliantly executed search that chose the revered anti-poverty warrior John Edwards.

Barack Obama, impressed by this track record of discernment, reportedly asked him to lead Obama’s search in 2008 — though Johnson withdrew when word got out that he benefited from the disgraced and disgusting Angelo Mozilo’s corrupt program of ‘special’ mortgages for political friends. (Mozilo was the head of Countrywide, a massively fraudulent and predatory lender which benefited hugely from its business connections with Fannie Mae.) He is a director of the much hated Goldman Sachs, a former director of Lehman Brothers, has chaired the board of the Brookings Institution, is a major Democratic Party fundraiser who bundled several hundred thousand dollars for President Obama, helped bring old Clinton friends into the Obama organization, and has been at the center of Democratic finance and politics for a generation.

Named CEO of Fannie Mae (a government backed mortgage corporation) Johnson decided to make untold wealth by making and securitizing junk housing loans and by massaging the financial reports to ensure that he qualified for the obscenely generous maximum bonus no matter what was actually happening to the company under his care.
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In the book i believe it was Johnson who reached out to Mozilo to buy his loans, Johnsons bonuses depended on it. If you knew someone was going to buy any loans you made, the worse the better, because Fannie got credit for low income loans, they had low income goals, why would you care who you made loans to? Johnson got a Friends Of Anthony Loan, along with Dodd. The whole thing was doomed to fail, unfortunately the wrong people have been mostly blamed.