Barney Frank and His Boyfriend Helped Create the Mortgage Meltdown

It looks like Massachusetts Dem Rep. Barney Frank was literally in bed with Fannie Mae:

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions... Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie...

Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress.

"I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus," Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. "On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover."

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector... Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis.

Mark Hemingway at The Corner points out that Frank has a history of "interesting" partners:

So this financial Ragnarok may be in part attributable to the fact Barney Frank dated a Fannie Mae exec when he was head of the Banking committee from 1991-1998? The incredible thing is that just a few years prior to hopping in bed with Fannie Mae (literally), Frank was dating a guy who ran a prostitution ring out of his apartment. Who knew the pimp would turn out to be the more ethical boyfriend?

And Frank was the guy the Dems turned to to fix this problem. Did he sleep with Paulson or Bernanke too?