Bank analyst and industry expert Christopher Whalen is stirring the pot over at Zero Hedge, wondering aloud if the recent outsized profits at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are really what they appear to be:

After years, no, really decades of obfuscation and outright mendacity, are the folks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac really telling us the truth now about their financial condition?  Washington is a city of lies, let us remember, with a good part of the population paid to disseminate falsities as part of their job description.  But the biggest lie of all was allowing the GSEs to avoid marking their impaired assets down to fair value as commercial banks are required to do.  Had this been done, the losses reported by the enterprises would have been far larger.