To its credit, Southern California Public Radio rounds up the blog criticism of a shoddy ProPublica report on Freddie Mac investments that I also critiqued in my KPCC appearance. One argument neither I nor the roundup mentions: selling off the less-risky elements of the mortgage derivatives and keeping the riskier elements for itself, Freddie Mac is (for better or worse) promoting homeownership by absorbing some of the risk of investing in mortgages, thus propping up housing prices by making more money available for lending. Of course, we'd be better off without this distorting intervention in the housing market: the ProPublica report is not wrong for criticizing Freddie Mac, but is criticizing Freddie Mac for the wrong reason. And its call for taxpayer subsidies to homeowners with bad credit would just make things worse.