Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) spend more than $170 million on lobbyists according to a report by AP.

What did you expect? They were no angels, says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning. It never hurts to have friends in high places. And Fannie and Freddie had the deepest pockets in town.

Now it’s payback time and  - surprise, surprise – the government is bending over backwards to ensure Fannie and Freddie won’t fail. All with taxpayers’ money, of course. More from Bill…

Friends in Washington come at a price… but the two mortgage companies had the deepest pockets in town – generously paying fees and expenses for a long list of former members of Congress and Capitol Hill hacks. The $170 million paid to lobbyists was just the beginning. Executives of the firms were also among the biggest contributors to political campaigns and to politicians’ pet programs and vanity charities.

What a glorious scam! The two pretended to be important parts of private enterprise… partaking in the grand scheme of risk/reward along with all other capitalist businesses… but they had the world’s biggest government standing behind them all the time; it was all reward and no risk, right from the beginning. Fannie and Freddie could funnel millions in profits from homeowners to politicians…and then, when they got into trouble, lay the losses onto shareholders and taxpayers.

Source: Fannie and Freddie: Playing With a Stacked Deck