Uncle Sam's Fire Sale. Minimum Investment: $1 Billion

In my investment letter, Addison Wiggin’s Apogee Advisory, we spend a great deal of time, money and resources looking for new investment ideas that our subscribers can act on independently. Sometimes what we find instead is outrage.

For example, the federal government is about to dump millions of the foreclosed homes at fire-sale prices to hedge funds and private-equity firms with government connections. If you’re an individual investor who might like to get in on the action, forget it! You’re shut out of this deal.

Homeowners who might be interested in buying the foreclosure property next door? Out of luck. And retirees hoping for a return on their money more than 1.8% on a five-year CD find another avenue closed off.

Prior to the calamity of 2008, we might have thought the deal we’re profiling today unthinkable. But now we’re becoming as immune to new instances of blatant cronyism as American babies are to diphtheria.

If you’ve got the hammer for it, we may as well get down to brass tacks: As many as 10,000 properties might be unloaded in a single transaction during the first quarter of 2012 – thanks to a government program so new it doesn’t have a catchy name yet, only the working title “Enterprise/FHA REO Asset Disposition.”

Roger Arnold, chief economist for Pasadena, Calif.-based ALM Advisors, has a different name for it – “the largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector.”

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