Fannie and Freddie now belong to US and WE will "provide as much capital as they need"

hold on to your wallets... here it comes... oh, and btw, check out where the new ceo of freddie hails from - the carlyle group... ain't THAT an interestin' coincidence...?!?!

The Treasury Department seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s giant quasi-public mortgage finance companies, and announced a four-part rescue plan that includes an open-ended guarantee from the Treasury Department to provide as much capital as they need to stave off insolvency.

At a news conference on Sunday morning, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. also announced that he had dismissed the chief executives of both companies and replaced them with two long-time financial executives. Herbert M. Allison, currently chairman of TIAA-CREF, the huge pension fund for teachers, will take over Fannie Mae and replace the chief executive, Daniel Mudd. David M. Moffett, currently a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group, one of the country’s biggest private equity firms, will replace Richard Syron as chief executive of Freddie Mac.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so large and so interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would cause great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe,” Mr. Paulson said. “This turmoil would directly and negatively impact household wealth: from family budgets, to home values, to savings for college and retirement. A failure would affect the ability of Americans to get home loans, auto loans and other consumer credit and business finance. And a failure would be harmful to economic growth and job creation.”

Mr. Paulson refused to say how much capital the government might eventually have to provide, or what the ultimate cost to taxpayers might be.

The companies are likely to need tens of billions of dollars over the next year, but the utlimate cost to taxpayers will largely depend on how and how fast the housing and mortgage markets recover from their current crisis.

of COURSE paulson refused to say how much the ultimate cost to the taxpayers might be... if he even hazarded an extremely conservative, low-end guess, american citizens would be out marching in the streets (which is what we SHOULD have been doing for the past two years)...

oh, yeah, and as of 10:30 a.m. pacific time this morning, fannie's website was still touting all the good stuff being worked on by the now-axed dan mudd...

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