Fannie Mae: Bloomberg: Fannie Mae will pay the Treasury Department $7.2 billion after posting an eighth straight quarterly profit, pushing total dividend payments above the $116.1 billion of aid it received after the financial crisis. Freddie Mac: Bloomberg: Freddie Mac, the U.S.-owned mortgage financier, will return $10.4 billion to the Treasury Department next month, bringing total payments to about $10 billion above what it got in aid after the 2008 credit crisis.
And? They are still two agencies that are used to distort the housing market. That distortion was a huge part of the 2008 debacle. Are you suggesting that this money, the result of untold foreclosures and who knows how many lives disrupted, is a good thing? The populist housing that these agencies were employed by Congress to create has resulted in just the opposite; fewer middle and lower class homeowners and lots of new renters paying their monthly rents to huge corporate owners who acquired the properties with government help and taxpayer supplied money. The little people lost big, all under the auspices of the intelligentsia who thought they could outwit capitalism, along with the people who realized that the outcome was going to be a disaster and positioned themselves to pick up the pieces and collect the end prize.
I'm assuming it'll be of the, 'They were worth saving' variety. I'd say, yea maybe, or maybe they all do fine when they don't get overly ...wait for it....Liberal with mortgage requirements, the way they did after Clinton loosened them up for people who couldn't qualify otherwise.
With a final loss after sale of GM stock at roughly 10 billion, I suppose you are correct. That's all it cost us to keep the GM employees in a job. $10 billion. I can afford that. Sure. Fuck you GM, and everybody associated with you. I will never buy a GM vehicle again. Not if you practically give them away.
Fannie and Freddie also created the 30year mortgage. - http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/how-30-year-mortgage-came-be It was the getting rid of glass-steagall and allowing Investment banking to return to Commercial banking drove the distortion of the housing market. Do you want the "Free Market" to adjust the housing market though foreclosures or do you want government to control the market? Explain why home ownership rates have been steadily increasing then over the long term since Fannie and Freddie have been made? 48% home ownership rates in the 1930's when Fannie was created to the over 60% rate today. Sounds like you support the idea of government controls to keep people protected from capitalism.
I would like it if the government would stop meddling. :up: I believe that there would be short term pain and then it would stabilize at a more realistic level. Current housing prices are driven by the absurd notion that everyone deserves to be a home owner.
