Who benefits and who won’t in the Freddie and Frannie debacle

I don’t know how full of bat guano the WSJ is, but their take on the take-over(pun intended) is this:

Homeowners,Short-sellers and  Republicans all win. The losers are Lobbyists, Stockholders, Congress, investors and the two idiots that ran Fannie and Freddie. From the writeup by Heidi Moore:

Stockholders: Common and preferred shares will remain listed but those juicy dividends are gone. Still, it isn’t the total wipeout many expected. Many banks and financial institutions, including J.P. Morgan Chase, had poured money into Fannie’s and Freddie’s preferred shares. The threat of the banks’ holdings becoming worthless raised the threat of a broad banking crisis. But Treasury will buy some of the preferred shares, and banishing the dividends will save Fannie and Freddie $2 billion a year.

Lobbyists: The mortgage giants wove a mantle of invincibility with their $170 million lobbying bills in the past decade. They spent $3.5 million on lobbying just in this year’s first quarter, spreading their largesse among 42 outside lobbying firms. Treasury has turned off the Fannie-Freddie lobbying spigot. Sen. Barack Obama pointedly said in a statement about Fannie and Freddie today, “any action we take must be focused not on the whims of lobbyists and special interests worried about their bonuses and hourly fees.”

Congress comes out of this looking like shit for various reasons. A column this weekend states that if this happened in the real world at a normal corporation all the congress critters would be packing up their desks and looking for work.

But it remains to be seen if the Homeowners will get any relief and if the investors and stockholders really take it in the shorts.