Coruscation

Fannie and Freddie developed as tools of credit enhancement; direct handouts offended laissez-faire sensibilities, whereas loan guarantees were nearly invisible. The practice of disguising government aid dates to the rescue of farmers and homeowners during the Depression. Mortgage capital barely existed and so, in 1934, the New Deal chartered the Federal Housing Administration to stimulate mortgage lending. Within a generation, the government was operating 74 separate programs to bolster credit through guarantees, insurance or outright loans, according to Sarah Quinn, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who researched these programs. The point, Quinn says, was nearly always the same: "to camouflage, hide, or understate the extent to which [the U.S. government] actually intervened in the economy."

President Johnson was perfectly willing to let Fannie backstop investors, but he had a problem. Every mortgage Fannie purchased went on the government's books, which were already strained by the Vietnam War. After valiant efforts to manipulate the budget, Johnson hit on a solution -- privatize Fannie, so that its expenditures would be somebody else's problem.

The clever twist was that Fannie, which exited the public sector in 1968, wasn't wholly separate. Investors viewed Fannie, and its new sibling, Freddie, as having the implicit backing of the Treasury. This lowered the companies' costs and arguably led to lower interest rates for borrowers.

As long as Fannie and Freddie stuck to conservative underwriting, the arrangement seemed to work. But Congress was eager to use the twins for political purposes, like increasing homeownership and affordable housing. As Dwight Jaffee, a professor at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, observed, legislators persuaded themselves that Fannie and Freddie could further such causes "basically at no cost."

When Fannie and Freddie began to face competition in their business of securitizing loans and providing liquidity to the mortgage market, their profits and stock prices took a nosedive. Seeking to recoup, the firms took more risk. And thanks to their implicit Treasury support, they could borrow virtually at will. Eventually, their debts reached the absurd level of 100 times their capital. When mortgage values tanked, a bailout was unavoidable.