7 Things You Need to Know About Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Sep 6, 2012
Exactly four years ago, during the early days of the financial crisis, the federal government took control of mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through a legal process called conservatorship. Since then, the two companies have required roughly $150 billion in taxpayer support to stay solvent, while the government has kept the housing market afloat by backing more than 95 percent of all home loans made in the United States. Fannie and Freddie remain two of the largest financial institutions in the world, responsible for a combined $5 trillion in mortgage assets.
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2. What role did Fannie and Freddie play in inflating the housing bubble of the mid- to late-2000s?
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During the bubble, loan originators backed by Wall Street capital began operating beyond the Fannie and Freddie system that had been working for decades by peddling large quantities of high-risk subprime mortgages with terms and features that drastically increased the chance of default. Many of those loans were predatory products such as hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages with balloon payments that required serial refinancing, or negative amortization, mortgages that increased the unpaid balance over time.
Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns packaged these high-risk loans into securities, got the credit-rating agencies to bless them, and then passed them along to investors, who were often unaware or misinformed of the underlying risks. It was the poor performance of the loans in these “private-label” securities—those not owned or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie—that led to the financial meltdown, according to the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, among other independent researchers.
In fact, Fannie and Freddie lost market share as the bubble grew: The companies backed roughly half of all home-loan originations in 2002 but just 30 percent in 2005 and 2006. In an ill-fated effort to win back market share, Fannie and Freddie made a few tragic mistakes. Starting in 2006 and 2007—just as the housing bubble was reaching its peak—Fannie and Freddie increased their leverage and began investing in certain subprime securities that credit agencies incorrectly deemed low-risk. Fannie and Freddie also lowered the underwriting standards in their securitization business, purchasing and securitizing so-called Alt-A loans. While Alt-A loans typically went to borrowers with good credit and relatively high income, they required little or no income documentation, opening the door to fraud (which was often perpetrated by the mortgage broker rather than the homebuyer). These decisions eventually contributed to the companies’ massive losses, but all this happened far too late to be a primary cause of the housing crisis.
3. Why did Fannie and Freddie require a taxpayer bailout?
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In 2008 Fannie and Freddie lost a combined $47 billion in their single-family mortgage businesses, forcing the companies to dig deep into their capital reserves. Nearly half of those losses came from Alt-A loans, despite those loans accounting for just 11 percent of the companies’ total business. But those losses were only the beginning: Between January 2008 and March 2012, Fannie and Freddie would lose a combined $265 billion, more than 60 percent of which was attributable to risky products purchased in 2006 and 2007. By late summer in 2008—about a year after the start of the housing crisis—Wall Street firms had all but abandoned the U.S. mortgage market, while pension funds and other major investors throughout the world continued to hold large amounts of Fannie and Freddie securities. If Fannie and Freddie were allowed to fail, experts agreed that the housing market would collapse even further, paralyzing the entire financial system. The Bush administration in September 2008 responded by placing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into government conservatorship, where they remain today.
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