Ataxia is the thing with feathers.

Fannie Mae Bailout

Let it be known that the government bailing out Fannie Mae is utter bullshit. The employees and executives at Fannie Mae doctor their books and even then can’t run a business properly (someone gave out a lot more money in mortgages than they should have been). Other companies in their situation are left to crash and burn, but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are deemed “too important” so the government gives them money pulled out of the Federal Reserve’s thin air, which will in turn increase inflation and reduce the value of the dollar even more, decimating our economy even more than it already has been. All this to benefit a bunch of rich assholes.

Philip Greenspun has a very nice post about this topic. Read it here.

In Roman times the employees of Fannie Mae would be decimated, i.e., they would draw lots and 90 percent of them would beat the unlucky 10 percent to death with clubs. What would be a modern equivalent? At the very least taxpayers should have the satisfaction of seeing the highest paid 100 Fannie Mae employees fired with two weeks of severance pay (it can’t be that hard to find replacements given that the current staff’s primary achievements have been accounting fraud and then insolvency).