Los Angeles Times: Fannie Mae reported Thursday that it earned $3.7 billion in the second quarter. Fannie, based in Washington, D.C., will pay a dividend of $3.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury next month. With its previous payments totaling $126.7 billion, Fannie has more than fully repaid the $116 billion it received from taxpayers.
Freddie Mac posted net income of $1.4 billion for the latest quarter. Freddie, based in McLean, Va., will pay a dividend of $1.9 billion to the government. Freddie will have paid $88.2 billion in dividends, exceeding its full government bailout of $71.3 billion.
BobSwern back in 2010
served up this quote and comment:
Ignoring the Elephant in the Bailout
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
New York Times
May 9, 2010
IF you blinked, you might have missed the ugly first-quarter report last week from Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giant that, along with its sister Fannie Mae, soldiers on as one of the financial world's biggest wards of the state...
--SNIP--
...Freddie and Fannie are nowhere to be seen in the various financial reform efforts under discussion on Capitol Hill. Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, offered a vague comment to Congress last March, that after some unspecified reform effort someday in the future, the companies "will not exist in the same form as they did in the past."
Fannie and Freddie, lest you've forgotten, have been longstanding kingpins in the housing market, buying mortgages from banks that issue them so the banks could turn around and lend even more. After both companies overindulged in the lucrative but riskier end of home loans, they nearly collapsed, prompting the I federal rescue. Since then, the government has continued to use the firms as mortgage buyers of last resort, to help stabilize a housing market that is still deeply troubled.
To some, the current silence on what to do about Freddie and Fannie is deafening -- as is the lack of chatter about Freddie's disastrous report last week.
"I don't understand why people are not talking about it," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, referring to Freddie's losses. "It seems to me the most fundamental question is, have they on an ongoing basis been paying too much for loans even since they went into conservatorship?
The fact that we experience days upon days of stock market "activity" where the trading of essentially bankrupt entities such as Citigroup, Bank of America, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and American International Group (AIG) comprise the bulk of all stock trades just further magnifies these truths, never mind (and the MSM does tell us to "never mind," because they really don't report this to the public at-large) the reminder of the past week of how precarious our nation's markets really are.
OH MY GOD. I HOPE YOU HYPERVENTILATED ENOUGH.
In the depths of the crisis, a big section of the US "left" didn't waste time convincing the public of the need for apublic bank or postal bank, or some innovative alternatives to Wall Street monopolization of investment capital to build some economic democracy. It did not divert itself with co-ops or ESOs or projects like those championed by Gar Alperovitz. It was not seduced by side issues like tax subsidies for Private Equity speculators or using the crisis to attack the crippling anti-labor laws like Taft-Hartley. It didn't even push for a stronger jobs bill, or to broaden the reach of consumer financial protection bill. No, the US left kept a laser like focus on apocalypse porn, despair, Birch Society paranoia about the Feb,libertarian demands for "mark to market", pitches for gold and silver, and, most of all, bitter personal attacks on members of the Obama administration. And it was wrong about everything.
Oh well. Let's all gather together to protest one group of financiers ripping off another - because surely the masses will rise up with pitchforks and suchlike once they get the horrors of Goldman-Sachs approach to asset valuation.