Fannie Mae
The Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a United States government-sponsored enterprise that has been a publicly traded company since 1968. Founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal, the corporation was established to expand the secondary mortgage market. It does this by securitizing mortgage loans into mortgage-backed securities, which allows lenders to reinvest their assets into additional lending. This process effectively increases the number of mortgage lenders by reducing reliance on local savings and loan associations. Its brother organization is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac.
As of 2025, Fannie Mae held over $4.3 trillion in assets, making it the largest company in the United States and the fifth largest company in the world by that metric. In the 2025 Fortune Global 500 rankings it placed 50th globally by total revenue. In terms of profit, Fannie Mae is the 17th most profitable company in the United States and the 32nd in the world.
History
Background and early decades
Historically, most housing loans in the early 1900s in the United States were short term mortgage loans with balloon payments. The Great Depression weakened the U.S. housing market, as people lost their jobs and were unable to make payments. By 1933, an estimated 20 to 25% of the nation's outstanding mortgage debt was in default. This resulted in foreclosures in which nearly 25% of America's homeowners lost their homes to banks. To address this, Fannie Mae was established by the U.S. Congress in 1938 by amendments to the National Housing Act as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Originally chartered as the National Mortgage Association of Washington, the organization's explicit purpose was to provide local banks with federal money to finance home loans in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing. Fannie Mae created a liquid secondary mortgage market and thereby made it possible for banks and other loan originators to issue more housing loans, primarily by buying Federal Housing Administration insured mortgages. For the first thirty years following its inception, Fannie Mae held a monopoly over the secondary mortgage market. Other considerations may have motivated the New Deal focus on the housing market: about a third of the nation's unemployed were in the building trade, and the government had a vested interest in getting them back to work by giving them homes to build.Fannie Mae was acquired by the Housing and Home Finance Agency from the Federal Loan Agency as a constituent unit in 1950. In 1954, an amendment known as the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act made Fannie Mae into "mixed-ownership corporation", meaning that federal government held the preferred stock while private investors held the common stock; in 1968 it converted to a privately held corporation, to remove its activity and debt from the federal budget. In the 1968 change, arising from the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Fannie Mae's predecessor was split into the current Fannie Mae and the Government National Mortgage Association.
Ginnie Mae, which remained a government organization, guarantees FHA-insured mortgage loans as well as Veterans Administration and Farmers Home Administration insured mortgages. As such, Ginnie Mae is the only home-loan agency explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.
In 1970, the federal government authorized Fannie Mae to purchase conventional loans, i.e. those not insured by the FHA, VA, or FmHA, and created the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, colloquially known as Freddie Mac, to compete with Fannie Mae and thus facilitate a more robust and efficient secondary mortgage market. That same year FNMA went public on New York and Pacific Exchanges.
In 1981, Fannie Mae issued its first mortgage pass-through and called it a mortgage-backed security. Ginnie Mae had guaranteed the first mortgage pass-through security of an approved lender in 1968 and in 1971 Freddie Mac issued its first mortgage pass-through, called a participation certificate, composed primarily of private mortgage loans.
1990s
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992. The Act amended the charter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reflect the Democratic Congress' view that the GSEs "have an affirmative obligation to facilitate the financing of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families in a manner consistent with their overall public purposes, while maintaining a strong financial condition and a reasonable economic return". For the first time, the GSEs were required to meet "affordable housing goals" set annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and approved by Congress. The initial annual goal for low-income and moderate-income mortgage purchases for each GSE was 30% of the total number of dwelling units financed by mortgage purchases and increased to 55% by 2007.In 1999, Fannie Mae came under pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers by increasing the ratios of their loan portfolios in distressed inner city areas designated in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.
In 1999, The New York Times reported that with the corporation's move towards the subprime market "Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s."
2000s
In 2000, because of a re-assessment of the housing market by HUD, anti-predatory lending rules were put into place that disallowed risky, high-cost loans from being credited toward affordable housing goals. In 2004, these rules were dropped and high-risk loans were again counted toward affordable housing goals.The intent was that Fannie Mae's enforcement of the underwriting standards they maintained for standard conforming mortgages would also provide safe and stable means of lending to buyers who did not have prime credit. As Daniel Mudd, then president and CEO of Fannie Mae, testified in 2007, instead the agency's underwriting requirements drove business into the arms of the private mortgage industry who marketed aggressive products without regard to future consequences:
Alex Berenson of The New York Times reported in 2003 that Fannie Mae's risk was much larger than was commonly believed. Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan: "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events 'unlikely'".
On January 26, 2005, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 was first introduced by U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel. The Senate legislation was an effort to reform the existing GSE regulatory structure in light of the recent accounting problems and questionable management actions leading to considerable income restatements by the GSEs. After being reported favorably by the Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in July 2005, the bill was never considered by the full Senate for a vote. Sen. John McCain's decision to become a cosponsor of S.190 almost a year later in 2006 was the last action taken regarding Sen. Hagel's bill in spite of developments since clearing the Senate Committee. McCain pointed out that Fannie Mae's regulator reported that profits were "illusions deliberately and systematically created by the company's senior management" in his floor statement giving support to S.190.
At the same time, the House also introduced similar legislation, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, in the spring of 2005. The House Financial Services Committee had crafted changes and produced a committee report by July 2005 for the legislation. It was passed by the House in October in spite of President George W. Bush's opposition to the House version, which stated: "The regulatory regime envisioned by H.R. 1461 is considerably weaker than that which governs other large, complex financial institutions." The legislation met with opposition from both Democrats and Republicans at that point and the Senate never took up the House passed version for consideration after that.
The mortgage crisis from late 2007
Following their mission to meet federal Housing and Urban Development housing goals, GSEs such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks had striven to improve home ownership of low and middle income families and underserved areas generally through special affordable methods such as "the ability to obtain a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a low down payment... and the continuous availability of mortgage credit under a wide range of economic conditions". Then in 2003–2004, the subprime mortgage crisis began. The market shifted away from regulated GSEs and radically toward Mortgage Backed Securities issued by unregulated private-label securitization conduits, typically operated by investment banks.As loan originators began to distribute more and more of their loans through private label PLS's, the GSEs lost the ability to monitor and control loan originators. Competition between the GSEs and private securitizers for loans further undermined GSEs' power and strengthened mortgage originators. This contributed to a decline in underwriting standards and was a major cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
Investment bank securitizers were more willing to securitize risky loans because they generally retained minimal risk. Whereas the GSEs guaranteed the performance of their mortgage-backed securities, private securitizers generally did not, and might only retain a thin slice of risk. Often, banks would offload this risk to insurance companies or other counterparties through credit default swaps, making their actual risk exposures extremely difficult for investors and creditors to discern.
The shift toward riskier mortgages and private label MBS distribution occurred as financial institutions sought to maintain earnings levels that had been elevated during 2001–2003 by an unprecedented refinancing boom due to historically low interest rates. Earnings depended on volume, so maintaining elevated earnings levels necessitated expanding the borrower pool using lower underwriting standards and new products that the GSEs would not securitize. Thus, the shift away from GSE securitization to private-label securitization also corresponded with a shift in mortgage product type, from traditional, amortizing, fixed-rate mortgages to nontraditional, structurally riskier, nonamortizing, adjustable-rate mortgages, and to the start of a sharp deterioration in mortgage underwriting standards. The growth of PLS, however, forced the GSEs to lower their underwriting standards in an attempt to reclaim lost market share to please their private shareholders. Shareholder pressure pushed the GSEs into competition with PLS for market share, and the GSEs loosened their guarantee business underwriting standards in order to compete. In contrast, the wholly public FHA/Ginnie Mae maintained their underwriting standards and instead ceded market share.
The growth of private-label securitization and lack of regulation in this part of the market resulted in the oversupply of underpriced housing finance. That led, in 2006, to an increasing number of borrowers, often with poor credit, who were unable to pay their mortgages – particularly with adjustable rate mortgage loans, causing a precipitous increase in home foreclosures. As a result, home prices declined as increasing foreclosures added to the already large inventory of homes and stricter lending standards made it more difficult for borrowers to get loans. This depreciation in home prices led to growing losses for the GSEs, which back the majority of US mortgages. In July 2008, the government attempted to ease market fears by reiterating their view that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play a central role in the US housing finance system". The US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve took steps to bolster confidence in the corporations, including granting both corporations access to Federal Reserve low-interest loans and removing the prohibition on the Treasury Department to purchase the GSEs' stock. Despite these efforts, by August 2008, shares of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had tumbled more than 90% from their one-year prior levels.