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Outspoken congressman Barney Frank has no shortage of critics, and they're sure to be out in force today. This morning, The Wall Street Journal reported that the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, along with his colleague Anthony Weiner, is actually recommending that Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) relax their lending standards on condominiums.

The controversial request follows a decision by both Fannie and Freddie to tighten mortgage-lending standards for condos. In March, Fannie said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70% of units have been rented, up from its previous benchmark of 51%. Freddie is due to implement similar measures in July. In a letter to the CEOs of both mortgage lenders, Reps. Frank and Weiner expressed their concerns that the higher standard "may be too onerous," and asked the lenders to "make appropriate adjustments" to their approach.

Has your broker repeatedly sold you on the "safe" investment vehicle, the mutual fund? Investing in a wide variety of prominent companies, with solid, long-term track records, mutual funds have been an easy-to-understand and popular investment choice for decades.

Mutual funds are hugely diversified, holding large stakes in recognizable names such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Citigroup (NYSE: C), Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), General Electric (NYSE: GE), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), and Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM).

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says we're trying to repeal what happened financially last year. Will it lead to strength industrially?

How low were we really? What was the real baseline pre-Lehman Brothers? What was going on in the country and the world before that financial atomic bomb dropped?

I struggle over that now, about what the true price of copper should be, about what the true price of oil should be, about the price of steel, all kinds of things. I try to figure out what the prices for everything were going to be before Lehman.

In celebration of Barry Ritholtz's critically-acclaimed new book Bailout Nation, he held The Big Picture Conference, which I was fortunate to attend.

Here are the main points from the most reputable speakers, Congressman Alan Grayson, Nassim Taleb, Doug Kass, and Josh Rosner.

Florida Congressman Alan Grayson discussed how systemic risk is an excuse for socialism and that interconnectedness is the main reason that these institutions are "too big to fail." In fact, these institutions no longer hold social or economic purpose, they are simply too big to exist.

All in all, this was actually a light day on the news flow for major stocks. Today's dismal Case-Shiller data for a record drop in housing prices was trumped completely by a surge in consumer confidence this morning. The notion that North Korea did a nuclear bomb test was only important for discussions during the very early morning, but slowly faded thereafter.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 8,473.49 +196.17 (2.37%)
S&P 500 910.31 +23.31 (2.63%)
Nasdaq 1,750.43 +58.42 (3.45%)

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Let's look at the numbers. Fannie Mae needs $19 billion. Match this against a loss of $23.2 billion and you have a net worth below zero.

That's not the end of it. Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM)is expected to need more money going forward, drawing on the government to supply the funds. Now some of this has been brought on by the government itself when it made Fannie program administrator for the government's housing market rescue.

Fannie suffered a net loss of $4.09 per share, which forced it to draw upon a $200 billion federal lifeline which was established for Fannie and Freddie.

Despite the market being up the last hour, today's stock market made six changes between being up and down. Oil inventories continued their building to record or near-record levels. It was very light on the economic calendar today so traders had to use the cumulative earnings as the directional report. Even very weak global recovery targets from the IMF were ignored.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 7,886.41 -83.15 (-1.04%)
S&P 500 843.56 -6.52 (-0.77%)
Nasdaq 1,645.85 +2.00 (0.12%)

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Today was just a day of selling the news. We had weak retail sales and we had lower than expected PPI data showing no inflation. But after a 5-week straight rally, investors were selling into earnings despite many estimates looking excessively easy to hit.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 7,918.11 -139.70 (-1.73%)
S&P 500 841.87 -16.86 (-1.96%)
Nasdaq 1,626.40 -26.91 (-1.63%)

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The follically challenged Herb Allison is likely to take over from Neel Kashkari, the former Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) banker who brought his shiny pate to Congress to get kicked in another part of his anatomy as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) continued to frustrate almost everybody. If approved, Allison's formal title will be assistant secretary for the Office of Financial Stability which administers TARP. Under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, TARP went from being a way to buy toxic assets to a source of capital for big banks -- whether they wanted it or not.

Now, Treasury Secretary Geithner wants to revive Paulson's original idea to the tune of a deeply flawed $1 trillion program to further enrich a handful of billionaire hedge fund and private equity honchos. And Geithner appears to have selected a very cold fish for that job -- former Merrill Lynch executive Allison -- a Yale philosophy major and Stanford MBA who lost out on the CEO's chair at Merrill Lynch a decade ago to the far more stock-broker-friendly David Komansky.

According to a report today in The Wall Street Journal [subscription required], Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) -- those twin titans of mortgage mayhem -- are planning to dish out $210 million worth of retention bonuses over the next 18 months. James Lockhart, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, explained that $51 million in payouts were distributed in late 2008, with the rest of the bonuses to be disbursed through 2009 and into early 2010.

The news is already raising politicians' ire, since Fannie and Freddie are staying afloat only through the grace of government bailouts. The two lenders reported combined losses of roughly $108 billion in 2008, says the Journal, yet 80% of Freddie's employees and 61% of Fannie's payroll will score retention bonuses based on this bleak operating performance.

$12.8 trillion of our money is going to bail out the bad bets of bankers, auto execs, and ordinary folks who took on mortgages they couldn't repay over the last 20 months. If you're among the 90% of the country that's been playing by the rules all these years, you may be wondering why that $12.8 trillion should come out of your pocket. After all, doesn't free markets mean that bettors get the pot when they win and pay the piper when they lose?

The "good" news is that of that $12.8 trillion, only a third -- or $4.2 trillion -- has actually been committed to a total of 34 distinct programs. The remaining $8.6 trillion is the limit of how much has been approved. And of that $12.8 trillion, 61% is under the control of the Fed in 20 programs, 16% is in the hands of the FDIC in 5 programs, another 21% will be spent by the Treasury in eight programs and the remaining two percent is being doled out by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in one program.

There are very few people on this planet that can honestly say that they have not been affected in some way by the economic firestorm caused by underappreciating risk.

Congress, along with the Securities and Exchange Commission during a period where the White House was comatose, opened up the flood gates for Wall Street's financial wizards to bet the world and lose!

Who is ready for a second round of bonus outrage (dare I call it a "bonus" round)? This time it is Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) that has awarded retention bonuses to four of its top executives -- let's see how mad everyone gets about this one.

The mortgage company told the SEC in a recent filing that it is going to award bonuses between $470,000 to $611,000 to four of its top executives. As is the nature of a bonus, this payment is on top of the executives' already-hefty base pay.

Investor Jim Rogers, noted for his expertise in commodities, is someone Wall Street professionals, business executives, and economists alike pay close attention to, as he's frequently been ahead-of-the-curve regarding market and investment trends.

Still, that's not to say that Rogers sometimes can't overdo it a bit and/or does not get it wrong.

A recent chat Rogers had with Bloomberg News is an example of the latter, as the talk yielded more rhetoric, half-truths, and flat out absurd statements and not a whole not of illumination.

I lump these zombies -- our first zombies -- together because everyone else does.

You and I are now the proud owner of these lifeless monsters, which have hundreds of billions of dollars in obligations on mortgages of declining quality.

What's more, for political reasons, their future will not be resolved for several years.

True shareholder value: zero

Michael Shulman is a contributor to OptionsZone.com.