Washington’s capacity to foster crony capitalist larceny and corruption never ceases to amaze. But according to the Bloomberg story below, Wall Street’s shameless thievery from US taxpayers is about to get a whole new definition.

To wit, Freddie Mac (FMCC) is handing three private equity billionaires deeply subsidized debt financing in order to undertake $18 billion in rental apartment deals. According to no less an authority than Morgan Stanley, the subsidy embedded in this cheap financing amounts to 150 basis points or roughly $150 million per year on the loan amounts in play.

Yet this largesse will serve no discernible public purpose whatsoever. Indeed, over the 10-year term of these loans the bonanza will amount to billions, but it will not generate a single new unit of housing. Nor will it provide a single dollar of incremental rent relief to any low or moderate income tenant.

That’s because the purpose of these giant loans is not to fund new construction of rental housing—– for which there is currently an arguable shortage. And it’s not even to incentivize owners to convert existing apartment buildings to affordable housing.

Instead, its sole effect will be to put the taxpayers in the business ofhighly leveraged Wall Street deal making. That is, it will fund what amounts to apartment company LBOs being undertaken by the largest players in the private equity world including Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group, Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group and John Grayken’s Lone Star Fund.

Each of these cats are billionaires many times over and their remit most definitely does not include bolstering the social safety net. What they are doing is buying giant apartment companies in high priced takeover deals. These LBOs will shower sellers and speculators with windfall gains, and Wall Street dealers and themselves with prodigious fees now and the prospect of pocketing double, triple or quadruple their modest cash equity investments not too far down the road.

Freddie Mac, of course, is the one and same crony capitalist monstrosity that helped take the US financial system to the brink in 2008. If Washington had any common sense and gumption at all, it would have taken it out back and shot it years ago.

But the K-Street lobbies kept it alive during the dark days after the crash and have now invented a new mission to purportedly facilitate affordable rental housing. But that’s a crock, and the true purpose could not be more blatantly obvious than in the three deals described in the Bloomberg article.

Thus, Freddie Mac will loan the Lone Star Fund $5 billion to finance an LBO of Home Properties. Folks, the latter is a rental housing REIT that is publicly traded, more than adequately financed and in no need of help from the nation’s taxpayers whatsoever. In fact, it already has about $2.4 billion of plain old market debt.

But it can be well and truly said that the punters and hedge funds which own the stock have made out like bandits. Its share price has tripled since the March 2009 bottom, but more importantly, was up by 35% just in the 18-months prior to the June 2015 LBO announcement.

HME data by YCharts

Did Home Properties earnings take-off in the last year or so, thereby warranting the stock price surge shown above?

No they didn’t. During the 12-months ended in June 2015, Home Properties earned $177 million or 4% less than the $185 million of net income it posted two years earlier for the June 2013 LTM.

So here’s what putting the US taxpayer back into harms’ way in this instance will accomplish. A rental housing REIT with more than 100 communities and 40,000 apartment units, and which currently is comprised of about 30% “affordable” units under Freddie Mac’s elastic definitions, will be shuffled from public to private ownership.

That’s it!

Its proud new billionaire owner won’t be required to add a single additional unit of so-called “affordable” housing, and that term doesn’t mean much anyway. Freddie Mac’s definition includes about 60% of US households!

Well, there is one thing different. What was a public REIT with $4.4 billion of equity market cap and $2.4 billion of debt has become a private LBO with $5 billion of debt and a deal fee tab in the order of $400 million.

In other words, the fools in Washington have descended so far down the rabbit hole of “help for housing” that they have managed to double the debt on these 40,000 rental units in order to cash out public equity investors who had no claim whatsoever to taxpayer support. Oh, yes, and to pay enormous fees to the deal banker, Goldman Sachs, which by all rights should be paying back taxpayers for its 2008 bailout, not scalping them yet again.

But when it comes to lunacy in the rabbit hole nothing comes close to the $5.3 billion LBO of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village by Blackstone also mentioned in the article. It appears that Freddie Mac will provide $2.5 billion of the takeover financing, meaning the annual subsidy will be in the order of $40 million.

Let’s be clear about “Stuy Town” as its called. It has absolutely nothing to do with poor people or any plausible notion of a social safety net. It is a monster housing complex on the lower east side of New York which encompasses 80 acres, 11,000 apartment units and upwards of 35,000 middle class inhabitants—–a good sized city in most of America.

It also happens to be ground zero for one of the more spectacular housing debt crashes last time around. It had been a $5.4 billion leveraged buyout in 2006 by Tishman Speyer and a BlackRock fund predicated on the fact that this legendary rent-stabilized complex would slowly return to free market rents as grand-fathered tenants moved on or passed away.

But the Greenspan credit bubble expired before the rent-protected tenant’s did or before mysteriously failing heating, plumbing and electrical services could induce enough tenants to move along on their own two feet to make the pro forma financial work.

In any event, the deal blow sky-high and resulted in billions of losses for the mortgage lenders involved and reversion of the complex to a consortium of creditors.