...or maybe two?  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to take a beating today, and over the course of the past week the two mortgage giants have each lost over a third of their value.

Both Fannie Mae [FNM $13.20] and Freddie Mac [FRE $8.00] are for-profit companies chartered by congress and trade publically on the New York Stock Exchange. Washington is taking its lumps over the recent bail-out of Wall Street firm Bear Sterns, so there is heightened interest in the government’s potential reaction to this latest round of troubles. It’s clear, however, that these companies play a more central role in our economy than Bear Sterns, and the Washington Post states that their federal sponsorship carries an “implicit guarantee” of government intervention in the eyes of many investors and analysts.

Also witness another $5 jump in crude oil today, a factor in the economy that I wrote about in a recent post.