Mortgage, Bailouts | featured news

The total cost to rescue and then overhaul mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reach $685 billion, according to estimates by Standard & Poor's.

The housing and mortgage markets aren't likely to improve much over the next year, which will make it harder for the government to reduce its support of the sector, Freddie Mac's chief executive said on Monday.

That figure, projected through 2013, represents a worst-case scenario that assumes a double-dip recession, the Federal Housing Finance Agency says. The finance giants have so far received about $148 billion in taxpayer funds.

Government-controlled mortgage finance giant says it will request $8.4B from taxpayers to stay afloat.

House lawmakers hold their first hearing about how to restructure the mortgage system.

Freddie Mac's losses narrowed to $6.3 billion in the third quarter, but the government-controlled mortgage finance company didn't ...

Freddie Mac reported a surprising profit in the second quarter, but the profit turned to a loss for shareholders after the company paid the U.S. government a $1.1 billion dividend.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank received $25 billion in bailout funds from the government, refused to tell CNBC anchor Melissa Francis how the bank is performing this quarter.

"Can you tell me how this quarter is doing for JPMorgan?" Francis asked.

Dimon's brief response: "I can't."

Banks can't unload their toxic assets. But what if their assets weren't toxic?

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will lay out a bank-rescue plan on Tuesday that will rely on public and private funds to take $500 billion of bad assets off banks' books, sources said.