Will the Outrages Never Cease?

In case you didn't see Gretchen Morgenson's must-read article in the NY Times:

Mortgage Giants Leave Legal Bills to the Taxpayers

An excerpt:The bulk of those expenditures - $132 million - went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.

Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.

In other words: in the public/private bizarro world of the GSE's the profits were private, the legal bills public...

Sweet deal. Be sure to read the rest of Morgenson's article-- if you can stand it.