An Autopsy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The arguments below concerning Fannie and Freddie's role in the crisis have been made many times here over the last several years, see the second link at the end, but it's worth a reminder given the concerted attempt by anti-government types to make people think that Fannie and Freddie played a large role in causing the crisis. They didn't. That's not to say that Fannie and Freddie are defensible in their present form, see this discussion for example, or this from Dean Baker. But placing the blame for the crisis in the wrong places will lead to ineffective and potentially counterproductive attempts to prevent this from happening again:

An Autopsy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, by Binyamin Applebaum, NY Times: Here’s a last-minute option for summer reading material: An autopsy on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by their overseer, the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The report aims to inform the continuing debate in Washington about the future of the government’s role in housing finance. ... And it does a good job of making a few key points:

1. Fannie and Freddie did not cause the housing bubble. In fact, you can think of the bubble as all the money that poured into the housing market on top of their regular and continuing contributions. There’s a good chart on Page 4 of the report illustrating this...

The market share of the two government-sponsored companies plunged after 2003, and did not recover until 2008. In 2006, at the peak of the mania, the companies subsidized only one-third of the mortgage market.

2. This was not for a lack of trying. The companies bought and guaranteed bad loans with reckless abandon. Their underwriting standards jumped off the same cliff as every other participant in the mortgage market.

3. Importantly, the companies’ losses are mostly in their core business of guaranteeing loans, not in their investment portfolios. The guarantee business is the reason the companies were created. ...

More here. And here.