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The Last Trillion-Dollar Commitment
...Managing their political risk required the GSEs to offer Congress a generous benefits package. Campaign contributions were certainly one element. Between the 2000 and 2008 election cycles, the GSEs and their employees contributed more than $14.6 million to the campaign funds of dozens of senators and representatives, most of them on committees that were important to preserving the GSEs' privileges.[2] And Fannie knew how to "leverage" its giving, not just its assets; often it enlisted other groups that profited from the GSEs' activities--the securities industry, homebuilders, and realtors--to sponsor their own fundraising events for the GSEs' key congressional friends. In addition to campaign funds, the GSEs--Fannie Mae in particular--enhanced their power in Congress by setting up "partnership offices" in the districts and states of important lawmakers, often hiring the relatives of these lawmakers to staff the local offices. Their lobbying activities were legendary. Between 1998 and 2008, Fannie spent $79.5 million and Freddie spent $94.9 million on lobbying Congress, making them the twentieth and thirteenth biggest spenders, respectively, on lobbying fees during that period.[3] Not all of these expenditures were necessary to contact members of Congress; the GSEs routinely hired lobbyists simply to deprive their opponents of lobbying help. Since lobbyists are frequently part of lawmakers' networks--and are often former staffers for the same lawmakers--these lobbying expenditures also encouraged members of Congress to support Fannie and Freddie as a means of supplementing the income of their friends....

...Even if the earlier affordable housing projects were not losers, however, they represented a new and extra-constitutional way for Congress to dispense funds that should otherwise have flowed through the appropriations process. In one sense, the expenditures were a new form of earmark, but this earmarking evaded the constitutional appropriations process entirely. An illustration is provided by a press release from the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the most ardent supporters of the GSEs in Congress. The headline on the release, dated November 20, 2006--right in the middle of the GSEs' affordable housing spending spree--was "Schumer Announces up to $100 Million Freddie Mac Commitment to Address Fort Drum and Watertown Housing Crunch." The subheading continued: "Schumer Unveils New Freddie Mac Plan with HSBC That Includes Low-Interest Low-Downpayment Loans. In June, Schumer Urged Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae Step Up to the Plate and Deliver Concrete Plans--Today Freddie Mac Is Following Through."[8] If this project had been economically profitable for Fannie or Freddie, Schumer would not have had to "urge" them to "step up." Instead, using his authority as a powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee--and a supporter of Fannie and Freddie--he appears to have induced Freddie Mac to make a financial commitment that was very much in his political interests but for which the taxpayers of the United States would ultimately be responsible....

...In addition, in January 2005, only a few months after the adverse OFHEO report on Fannie's accounting manipu-lation, three Federal Reserve economists published a study that cast doubt on whether the GSEs' activities had any significant effect on mortgage interest rates and concluded further that holding portfolios--a far risker activity than issuing MBS--did not have any greater effect on interest rates than securitization: "We find that both portfolio purchases and MBS issuance have negligible effects on mortgage rate spreads and that purchases are not any more effective than securitization at reducing mortgage interest rate spreads."[11] Thus, the taxpayer risks cited by Greenspan could not be justified by citing lower mortgage rates, and, worse, there was a strong case for limiting the GSEs to securitization activities alone--a much less profitable activity than holding MBS.

The events in 2003 and 2004 had undermined the legitimacy of the GSEs. They could no longer claim to be competently--or even honestly--managed. An important and respected figure, Alan Greenspan, was raising questions about whether they might be creating excessive risk for taxpayers and systemic risk for the economy as a whole. Greenspan had suggested that their most profitable activity--holding portfolios of mortgages and MBS--was the activity that created the greatest risk, and three Federal Reserve economists had concluded that the GSEs' activities did not actually reduce mortgage interest rates. It was easy to see at this point that their political risk was rising quickly. The case for continuing their privileged status had been severely weakened. The only element of their activities that had not come under criticism was their affordable housing mission, and it appears that the GSEs determined at this point to play that card as a way of shoring up their political support in Congress.

From the perspective of their 2008 collapse, this may seem to have been unwise, but in the context of the time, it was a shrewd decision. It provided the GSEs with the potential for continuing their growth and delivered enormous short-term profits. Those profits were transferred to stockholders in huge dividend payments over the past three years (Fannie and Freddie paid a combined $4.1 billion in dividends last year alone) and to managers in lucrative salaries and bonuses. Indeed, if it had not been for the Democrats' desire to adopt a housing relief bill before leaving for the 2008 August recess, no new regulatory regime for the GSEs would have been adopted at all. Only the Senate Republicans' position--that there would be no housing bill without GSE reform--overcame the opposition of Senators Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the banking committee chairman, and Schumer.

The GSEs' confidence in the affordable housing idea was bolstered by what appears to be a tacit understanding. Occasionally, this understanding found direct expression. For example, in his opening statement at a hearing in 2003, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), now the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, referred to an "arrangement" between Congress and the GSEs that tracks rather explicitly what actually happened: "Fannie and Freddie have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable, both in general through leveraging the mortgage market, and in particular, they have a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing."[12] So here the arrangement is laid out: if the GSEs focus on affordable housing, their position is secure....

...Beginning in 2004, after the GSEs' accounting scandals, the junk loan share of all mortgages in the United States began to rise, going from 8 percent in 2003 to about 18 percent in 2004 and peaking at about 22 percent in the third quarter of 2006. It is likely that this huge increase in commitments to junk lending was largely the result of signals from Fannie and Freddie that they were ready to buy these loans in bulk. For example, in speeches to the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2004, both Raines and Richard Syron--the chairmen, respectively, of Fannie and Freddie--"made no bones about their interest in buying loans made to borrowers formerly considered the province of nonprime and other niche lenders."[17] Raines is quoted as saying, "We have to push products and opportunities to people who have lesser credit quality."...

...Between 2005 and 2007, Fannie and Freddie acquired so many junk mortgages that, as of August 2008, they held or had guaranteed more than $1.011 trillion in unpaid principal balance exposures on these loans. The losses already recognized on these exposures were responsible for the collapse of Fannie and Freddie and their takeover by the federal government, and there are undoubtedly many more losses to come....

...For many years before 2004, Fannie and Freddie had followed relatively prudent investment strategies, even with respect to affordable housing, but they suddenly changed their approach in 2005. Freddie Mac's report, for example, shows that the percentage of mortgages in its portfolio with subprime characteristics rose rapidly after 2004. Tables 1 and 2 show that for each category of mortgages with subprime characteristics, most of the portfolio of loans with those characteristics was acquired from 2005 to 2007. For example, 83.8 percent of Fannie's and 90 percent of Freddie's interest-only loans as of June 2008 were acquired from 2005 to 2007, and 57.5 percent of Fannie's and 61 percent of Freddie's loans with FICO scores of less than 620 as of June 2008 were acquired from 2005 to 2007. It seems unlikely that competing for market share or complying with HUD regulations--which contained no enforcement mechanism other than disclosure and delay in approving requests for mission expansions--could be the reason for such an obviously destructive course.

Instead, it seems likely that the event responsible for the GSEs' change in direction and culture was the accounting scandal that each of them encountered in 2003 and 2004. In both cases, they lost their reputation as well-managed companies and began to encounter questions about their contribution to reducing mortgage rates and their safety and soundness. Serious observers questioned whether they should be allowed to continue to hold mortgages and MBS in their portfolios--by far their most profitable activity--and Senate Republicans moved a bill out of committee that would have prohibited this activity.

Under these circumstances, the need to manage their political risk became paramount, and this required them to prove to their supporters in Congress that they still served a useful purpose. In 2003, as noted above, Frank had cited an arrangement in which the GSEs' congressional benefits were linked to their investments in affordable housing. In this context, substantially increasing their support for affordable housing--through the purchase of the subprime loans permitted by HUD--seems a logical and even necessary tactic....