Heads Up Our Fannies

Since I have been posting about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac I thought it would be good to see their current definition in Wikipedia.com. I think you will find their definitions interesting:


Fannie Mae

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) (NYSE: FNM), commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a stockholder-owned corporation chartered by Congress in 1968 as a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), but founded in 1938 during the Great Depression. The corporation's purpose is to purchase and securitize mortgages in order to ensure that funds are consistently available to the institutions that lend money to home buyers.[3]

On September 7, 2008, James Lockhart, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being placed into conservatorship of the FHFA. The action is "one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades".[4][5][6] As of 2008, Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.'s $12 trillion mortgage market.[7]

THE LINK:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae



Freddie Mac

• The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), known as Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), is a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) of the United States federal government. Freddie Mac has its headquarters in the Tyson's Corner CDP in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia.[1][2]

• The FHLMC was created in 1970 to expand the secondary market for mortgages in the US. Along with other GSEs, Freddie Mac buys mortgages on the secondary market, pools them, and sells them as a mortgage-backed security to investors on the open market. This secondary mortgage market increases the supply of money available for mortgage lending and increases the money available for new home purchases. The name, "Freddie Mac", was an acronym of the company's full name that had been adopted officially for ease of identification (see "GSEs" below for other examples).

• On September 7, 2008, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James B. Lockhart III announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA (see Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The action has been described as "one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades".[3][4][5]

Moody's gave Freddie Mac's preferred stock an investment grade rating of A1 until August 22, 2008 when Warren Buffett said publicly that both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had tried to attract him and others. Moody's changed the credit rating on that day to Baa3, the lowest investment grade credit rating. Freddie's senior debt credit rating remains Aaa/AAA from each of the major ratings agencies Moody's, S&P, and Fitch.


THE LINK:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mac