$160 million here, $160 million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money

Barney Frank famously wanted to "roll the dice" a bit more with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the taxpayers are still cleaning up the mess from that particular crap game. Today the New York Times reports that we've picked up a $160,000,000 bill for defending the mortgage agencies' former executives in their various trials for fraud. That's right: one government agency investigates crooks, and another pays their legal expenses. But cheer up: we won a victory of sorts: three of the crooks returned $31,400,000! It would have been cheaper to buy them each a retirement home. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'We're all working for the government now'

So says a realtor in Casa Grande, Arizona, as reported today in the New York Times. Those government-created (and now government-owned) agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have spent $149 billion of the taxpayers' money on mortgages that went bad. It is the most costly bailout in the history of mankind.

 It costs, on the average, $10,000 for the government to sell one house, cleaning it and replacing stolen appliances and filling the swimming pool. Among other things, Fan and Fred pay $80 for a contractor to mow the lawn, every couple of weeks. Nationwide, the lawn guy is costing us $10 million a month. And of course that's only the overhead: the house will likely be sold for half the cost of the mortgage that Barney Frank cosigned on our behalf. But at least that realtor in Casa Grande is making a good income!

"I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing," as Mr. Frank famously said of the "liar loans" Fan and Fred were underwriting in 2003. Can you imagine how long BP's Tony Haywood would hold his job if he had been as spectacularly wrong as the Congressman? All Mr. Haywood did was spill some oil. Barney Frank spilled the American economy. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

how much has this man cost you?

Barney Frank, who famously chose to 'roll the dice' with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is a very expensive congressman. Yesterday Fan estimated that she would require $11-$16 billion from the US Treasury to cover losses related to the home-mortgage defaults that Mr Frank did so much to encourage. Fred meanwhile might need $30-$35 billion, in addition to the $14 billion already provided by the Treasury. That's a total (so far!) of $65 billion, or $215 for every man, woman, and child in these United States. In theory, Mr Frank represents only a fraction of the Massachusetts population. But we are all paying for his roll of the dice. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Barney Frank does it again

The institutionalised corruption of the US Congress got a bit of an airing yesterday, when we learned that the irrepressible Barney Frank used his political influence to steer $12 million to OneUnited, a Massachusetts bank that met none of the usual criteria for a TARP loan. (Story in the Wall Street Journal-–where else?) Mr Frank of course is one of the main instigators of the Fan/Fred meltdown of last fall, hence of the financial hiccup that did so much to bring the world’s economies low. It seems that OneUnited held a bunch of Fannie Mae preferred shares. When the US Treasury effectively nationalized Fan, making the shares worthless, OneUnited’s lawyer immediately got on the phone to Mr Frank and also to Maxine Waters, a California congresswoman whose husband (wait for it!) sits on the bank’s board of directors.

So Mr Frank wrote a provision into the bank bailout bill that applied expressly to banks like OneUnited, and to make sure the regulators got the message, he phoned one of them (he doesn’t remember whom) and asked that OneUnited be among the recipients. On December 19, the US Treasury obediently sent $12 million of your money to the Boston bank.

The man nominated as Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, told the Senate yesterday that ‘there are serious concerns about transparency and accountability … and a deep scepticism about whether we are using the taxpayers’ money wisely.’ This is the same Mr Geithner who neglected to pay $34,000 in payroll taxes even after his employer—the International Monetary Fund!--had reminded him of his duty to do so. Blue skies! – Dan Ford