Follow POL on Twitter Today, the momentum is growing for fundamentally restructuring the national residential mortgage market in the wake of the earlier collapse of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA, or "Fannie Mae") and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC, or "Freddie Mac). These two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)--so-called in recognition of their hybrid public/private nature--have long written large chunks of the residential home mortgage market, to the tune of trillions of dollars. The current legislative fixes now on the table include a bipartisan proposal from Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo, coupled with an earlier entry by Maxine Waters. The Johnson-Crapo proposal follows on earlier entries from Jeb Hensarling on the House side and Bob Corker on the Senate side. Each of these proposals seeks simultaneously to unwind the past and to redefine the future. To evaluate them requires understanding the historical linkage between past events and future prospects.
To begin, some background. In response to the brewing subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, Congress in late July of that year passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA). That legislation, inter alia, created a new Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which on September 7, 2008 placed into a conservatorship both GSEs. These conservatorships were intended to keep both entities alive in order to facilitate their return to the private market. They were not receiverships whose object is the orderly liquidation of the two businesses. The basic plan called for an infusion of up to $200 billion in fresh cash into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under a Senior Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement (SPSPA) that gave the government warrants, exercisable at a nominal price, to acquire a 79.9 percent ownership stake in each enterprise. In exchange for that advance the senior preferred stock carried a 10 percent annual dividend payment, which went up to 12 percent if the GSEs delayed their dividend payments on the senior preferred.
The terms of that deal were radically altered in August 2012, when the United States, acting through the Treasury Department, imposed, through the Third Amendment to the 2008 SPSPA, a "net worth sweep" that entitled the government to 100 percent dividends on future earnings. That one bold stroke effectively made it impossible for the GSEs to repay their loans and rebuild their capital stock. Both the junior preferred stockholders and the common shareholders could under this agreement never receive a dime from either GSE, even after the entities returned to profitability. Assessing this gambit requires understanding two things: first, the relationship between the Third Amendment and the original 2008 SPSPA; and second, the relationship between the Third Amendment and efforts to revitalize the housing market. Both relationships are widely misunderstood today.
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