The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

4. Fannie Slap

United we stand, divided we fall, and if our backs should ever be against the wall, we'll ...just pass along higher fees to the average American.

Fannie Mae (FNM Quote - Cramer on FNM - Stock Picks) and Freddie Mac (FRE Quote - Cramer on FRE - Stock Picks) put a new spin on the government's "all for one and one for all" attempts to find a solution to the nation's housing mess.

The ink was barely dry on the plans from Treasury and the White House to help alleviate pressure on the mortgage market when the government-sponsored enterprises announced new surcharges for mortgage borrowers who are borrowing more than 70% of the home's value, i.e. folks who have a down payment less than 30%, which is the vast majority of borrowers.

Depending on the FICO credit score, the fees range from 0.75% to as high as 2% of the loan; the midpoint of those fees would add an additional $351 in fees on a $255,500 mortgage, the average price of a single-family home in America.

"This is no time for Fannie Mae's [and Freddie Mac's] business interests to take precedence over its mission responsibility," said the National Association of Home Builders, which called the new fees "a broad tax on homeownership."

But officials of the quasi public-private enterprises, created by an act of Congress to help facilitate mortgage lending and which have enjoyed reduced borrowing costs because of their presumed government guarantee, see it differently.

"The business that we're in is to providing a guarantee to lenders that those underlying loans will perform over time," Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd told CNBC. "Right now in this market with all the uncertainty, and with the softness in home prices, the certainty with which you can guarantee that those loans can perform is more expensive. So where it makes sense and where fees we're getting don't compensate for the risk we're taking, we're moving fees up. The pricing reflects the risk we're taking in a market that's far from certain right now"

For Freddie's part, CEO Richard Syron told the network: "This is a tough time for a lot of people. It's been a very tough time with investors. We all have to share the pain."

Funny, we don't recall Fannie and Freddie sharing the bounty when the good times were rolling.

Dumb-O-Meter score: 82: "We're a publicly chartered company that has shareholders," Syron explained at the Goldman Sachs financial services conference this week. "So I don't have the right, nor would I want the right, nor do I intend to be in a situation where we say we won't do what's right for the shareholders in order to subsidize some other market. We're just not going to do it." (Take that, U.S. taxpayers and homeowners!)