Reassuring Answers
Monday, December 20, 2004; Page E10
"Well, they've got it in writing. That's one of the things that's happened now since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that CFOs and CEOs have to personally certify to their financial statements. And so we go to a great effort to every quarter, to satisfy ourselves that we have in place the kinds of internal controls necessary to make that kind of certification."
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"The answer to that is clearly, no. We have not. If we had, I would have violated the law in certifying our financial results. If we had, our auditors would be obligated to publicly do something about that."
"I think it has been devastating to the reputation of these firms, and I think it has caused material harm to consumers, because we have seen the uncertainty injected into the capital markets, and that uncertainty takes the form of higher interest cost."
"And we have suffered a lot of that, and I think unfairly, because as I mentioned before, unlike Freddie Mac, we didn't do any of these things. We should not be subject to the same penalty that they are being subjected to."
"We welcome the review by OFHEO, because we have a great deal of confidence in our application of appropriate accounting principles."
"We don't use any exotic derivatives, just the plain vanilla options and interest-rate swaps to achieve our goals."
"We work very hard at Fannie Mae to be a best-in-class company with regard to corporate governance and disclosures, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are apparently quite different companies in that regard."
