America Still Has Its Housing/Mortgage Disaster!

Those lousy Greeks/Europeans, how can they spend so much money propping up their failed economy and jobless cretins and mountains of bad debt? Don't they have capitalist scruples or whatever? Oh yeah, and America's government-run mortgage hander-outer, Fannie Mae, needs another $8.4 billion to get through next week maybe, things have been sort of tough, what with the $11.5 billion loss just in the first quarter of this year.

TheWall Street Journalreports:

Fannie's losses reflected continuing weakness in the housing market and would have been worse without accounting changes that reduced its deficit. The quarterly loss was an improvement from the $23.5 billion loss for the year-ago quarter and marked the 11th consecutive quarterly loss for the Washington-based firm.

The company has now racked up losses of nearly $145 billion, or nearly double its profits for the previous 35 years.

Oh but that's okay, at least theotherbig government backer of home mortgages is okay, right? Uhh:

Freddie Mac, the bailed-out mortgage-finance giant, reported Wednesday that it continues to lose money and needs an additional $10.6 billion in assistance from U.S. taxpayers.

But mortgage delinquencies through Fannie Mae fell by a tenth of a percent, so that's good? Besides, real estate always goes up! As terrible as this all sounds, Fannie and Freddie are basically holding up the entire American Mortgage market right now -- 96.5% ofall new mortgagesin this doomed nation are either held or guaranteed by the two government-run giants.

As bad as the situation may be, without government conservatorship, Fannie and Freddie could've gone down like Lehman Brothers. It is difficult to imagine the chaos and horror that would follow ... and that's why Dangerous Lunatic John McCain just introduced legislation to just shut the danged things down. [ Washington Post / Wall Street Journal / Washington Post ]