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Saturday Assets & Liabilities

Assets

Armando Falcon, Jr. Armando who, you say? For the past five years, he's been director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo), the agency that polices Fannie and Freddie. He also announced Tuesday that he will be stepping down next month, at the end of his current five-year term. Falcon might not have always been the perfect regulator -- certainly many of Fannie and Freddie's worst abuses reached their apex on his watch. But he at least deserves credit for a "death bed conversion" of sorts. Now that those abuses have been revealed, he has been as aggressive as anyone in his shoes probably could be in cleaning them up. Not "perfect world" aggressive, mind you. But he's done his best. Which is better than we've come to expect from the GSEs' protectors on the Hill.

Liabilities

Kirk Kerkorian His lawsuit against DaimlerChrysler was dismissed yesterday. I haven't been following this case very closely at all. I don't profess to be an expert on it. For all of my postings on General Motors, I don't even claim to have much to say about the auto industry in general. So I will just say that this suit always struck me as a bit, well, odd. Kerkorian claimed that management had lied when it called Daimler-Benz's takeover of Chrysler a "merger." Perhaps they did. But who really believed them? Cranky Dad is not an investor, and the business page is not the first section to which he turns when he sits down to read his morning paper. Yet I remember even him joking about how silly it was that anyone would think this was a merger. "Silly" seems like a good word to describe this lawsuit. Those silly disgruntled billionaire investors.