Same as it Ever Was………

It looks like GSE Freddie Mac may need another baliout:

Freddie Mac is expected to report a loss when it announces first-quarter earnings before the bell on Tuesday. That’s bad news for any public company, but especially critical for the mortgage provider because of its tangled history with the federal government.

Freddie and its counterpart, Fannie Mae were put into conservatorship in 2008 as the mortgage meltdown ensnared the financial system. They have lingered as wards of the state ever since. The Treasury Department modified the deal in 2012, requiring Fannie and Freddie to send all quarterly profits to the government — and shrink their reserves to zero by 2018.

As Mel Watt, the chairman of Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, put it in a speech in February, Fannie and Freddie are quickly approaching the point where they won’t be able to weather quarterly losses without going back to the Treasury for taxpayer dollars.

………

Bank analyst Richard Bove speculated about the possibility of a first-quarter loss in a recent note. “It is impossible for an outsider to predict what this will do to Freddie Mac earnings but it is not unrealistic to assume a loss of $2 billion plus in derivatives (it could be as high as $4 billion or more). At the $2 billion plus level, Freddie Mac’s pretax earnings would be negative $749 million,” Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets, wrote.

Spokeswomen for Freddie and its regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, declined to comment.

A Treasury draw is a possibility, Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi told MarketWatch, although he thinks the chance of one is “less than 50-50.”

The 10-year Treasury declined 49 basis points in the first quarter, far more than the 29-basis point drop that caused Freddie’s loss last year, noted Laurie Goodman, director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. (A basis point is one one-hundredth of a percentage point.)

Time to party like it's late 2008, I guess.

Seriously, has there been a financial "Innovation" since the Automatic Teller Machine that has been about anything but ripping the rest of us off?

We are now in a never ending bust and bust cycle where the banksters get richer, and the rest of us get poorer.