The misadventures of Fannie and Freddie

WASHINGTON, DC: Gigantic government’s complexity and opacity provide innumerable opportunities for opportunists to act unconstrained by clear law or effective supervision.

Today’s example, involving the government’s expropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars, features three sets of unsympathetic actors—a grasping federal government, a few hedge funds nimble at exploiting the co-mingling of government and the private sector, and two anomalous institutions that should never have existed.