Efforts to use the troubled mortgage finance firms to fix housing market problems are likely to push the taxpayer bill for Fannie & Freddie above $100 billion.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The first big government bailout of the financial crisis -- the takeover of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- is poised to be the most expensive and complicated to complete.
Since Congress essentially wrote a blank check to the Treasury Department in July 2008 to do what needed to be done to inject capital into the two firms, Fannie (FNM, Fortune 500) has received $34.2 billion of direct government support while Freddie (FRE, Fortune 500) has received $51.7 billion.
While that's lower than the $117.5 billion poured into insurer AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) by the Federal Reserve and the $200 billion given to the nation's largest banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, the current cost of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts dwarfs original estimates from a year ago
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