Charles Gasparino

'World News' Trumps Up Severity of Former Countrywide CEO Civil Charges

Throughout 2008, Countrywide Financial, now owned by Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), was attacked as being culpable for the financial crisis. Adam Lashinsky of Fortune magazine, in an appearance on Fox News Channel's "Cavuto on Business" June 21, 2008, predicted the attacks "won't stop until they do a perp walk with Angelo Mozilo - the CEO of Countrywide."

A year later, a report on ABC's June 4 "World News with Charles Gibson" is seemingly championing that cause. Before a single criminal charge has even been filed, senior justice correspondent Pierre Thomas was already showing footage of jail cells. Thomas blamed Mozilo for being the "catalyst" of the housing crisis.

"Investigators say Mozilo was selling $140 million in stock as Countrywide imploded," Thomas said. "To many, Mozilo, known for his deep tan and aggressive style, was the king of subprime mortgages - those risky loans that were the catalyst for the housing meltdown. Mozilo, the son of a butcher from The Bronx, has always maintained publicly that he's never misled anybody."

CNBC Reporter: Obama Suffers 'Blind Loyalty' to Economy-killing Policies

The stock market is casting a vote of "no confidence" in Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his Republican opponent is missing an opportunity to slam the freshman senator for an economic agenda that is a rehash of the worst of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.

So argued on-air editor Charles Gasparino in an October 13 op-ed in the New York Post, where the CNBC talent mentioned that even Obama's Wall Street backers are nervously telling him to change course on his economic plans (emphases mine):

Overall, his [Obama's] plan includes some of the most lethal tax increases imaginable, including a jump in the capital-gains rate. He'd expand government spending massively, with everything from new public-works projects to increases in foreign aid to a surge in Afghanistan - plus hand out a token $500 welfare check that he calls a tax cut to everyone else.

This is clearly the wrong way to go in the wake of an economic meltdown - yet Obama, for all his talk of how willing he is to compromise, of how he'd bring people together, is sticking to his tax guns.

I know at least one top Wall Street executive, an Obama supporter from the start of his campaign, who has recently urged Obama to rethink his tax plan - and that was before last week's record losses on the Dow.