Heritage expert David John recently wrote a paper titled “End Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to Build Tomorrow’s Housing Finance System” What will ending Fannie and Freddie do to your mortgage? Will starting over have much of an impact on the housing market? Join our LIVE discussion and get your questions answered. Lunch with Heritage feat. David John
Given the task of producing a plan to develop a new housing finance system after the crisis of 2008 and the failure of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—a task that everyone agrees will be extremely complex—the Obama Administration decided to punt. Rather than one detailed plan, it produced brief summaries of three very different ones, leaving the nation to wonder what the Administration really wants. The report clearly supports ending both Fannie and Freddie, but what happens next is very unclear. The three proposals for the future after Fannie …
$154 billion. That is the amount of taxpayer money that will be needed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac according to a new “stress test” performed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. And that is the good news. If the economy dips into a second recession and foreclosures rise, the Fannie and Freddie bailout could nearly double in size. The agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, released the numbers “to inform public debate about the future of the two companies” ahead of expected Obama administration proposals slated for …
This past Friday the Associated Press reported: Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out. The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say. Faced with this reality, Media Matters fellow Duncan Black blogged:
At 300 East 23rd Street in the exclusive Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, where to get into parts of the park you need a key granted just to residents, a new 98-unit luxury apartment complex has been built with an outdoor movie theater and panoramic city views. The problem is that not enough buyers are coughing up the $820,000 to $3 million the project’s developers are asking for the privilege to own a unit in the building. But don’t worry, the Obama administration is coming to the rescue. Last December, …
Despite their key role in creating the housing crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not being reformed, and will continue to cost the American taxpayer huge sums of money for the foreseeable future. There will be a housing summit on Tuesday, but its already clear that the federal government will remain in the mortgage business, despite the scandals that have emerged. Bailouts of the mortgage giants have already cost the taxpayer $111 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects they will cost another $290 billion this year alone. (This …
On July 21, when President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, he promised: “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.” How long will this Obama promise last? Well, The New York Times reports today that “the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes,” including a program announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that “will draw on $1 billion authorized by the new financial overhaul law.” That’s right. The Dodd-Frank “no more taxpayer-funded bailouts …
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not known for overly cautious mortgage financing. To the contrary, their open wallets helped fuel the credit crisis of 2008, and drove the two into federal receivership. To date, taxpayers have paid some $145 billion to keep them afloat, with no end in sight. Thus, its rather surprising to see the two in court for being too stingy. But that’s exactly where they are, having been sued earlier this month by California for refusing to finance properties in the federal government’s “Property Assessed Clean …
As President Obama today signed into law the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, two words were left unspoken: Fannie and Freddie. Yet they not only played a major role in creating the housing bubble that led to the meltdown of 2008, they stand today as the primary remaining bailout debtors to the U.S. treasury. As shown in this chart, the two bankrupt mortgage giants owe almost half — 45% — of the outstanding bailout money from the federal treasury. And as Heritage fellows David John and James Gattuso pointed out in …
A whopping 62 percent of Americans now say the United States is on the wrong track, yet President Barack Obama and liberals in Congress continue to steer the country in the same downhill direction toward bigger government. That runaway train picked up more speed this morning, as a House-Senate conference committee came to a final agreement on a Wall Street reform bill that’s packed with $19 billion in new taxes and fees on banks (which consumers will end up paying), a new consumer-unfriendly Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and a complete …
