All the Devils Are Here [33]
This business also helped make Fannie even more of a force on Wall Street. Over the years, it paid Street firms hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fees to issue all the debt. “People dealt with them [Fannie and Freddie] as if they were sovereign credits,” says one former Wall Streeter. “You just knew better than to get on the wrong side of them.”
By the end of the decade, Fannie Mae had become America’s third largest corporation, ranked by assets. Freddie was close behind. The companies were ranked one and two respectively on Fortune’s list of the most profitable companies per employee. Fannie’s stock price had soared. Its market value under Johnson went from the $10.5 billion he’d inherited from Maxwell to over $70 billion. “There is no other financial institution in America with such a significant share of such a huge market,” Johnson said in one speech, and he was exactly right.
Here’s the great irony of the mortgage market in the 1990s: to the extent that lower- and moderate-income Americans were being swept along in the rising tide of homeownership in the 1990s, it was happening not because of Fannie and Freddie, but despite them. The replacement of the S&L industry by the new mortgage origination companies; the toughening, in the 1990s, of the Community Reinvestment Act, which forced banks to make loans to people in poorer neighborhoods; even the rise of the subprime industry (though it was more focused on refinancings than new home loans)—these were all factors in helping poorer people own homes. Fannie and Freddie may have been given a federal mandate to help lower- and moderate-income Americans buy homes, but the GSEs were cautious about the credit risk they took. They preferred to game their housing goals rather than meet them, using methods that Fannie referred to internally as “stupid pet tricks.” They wanted nothing to do with subprime. Subprime loans didn’t conform. And anyway, there was so much money to be made elsewhere.
Many affordable housing activists found this infuriating. For all its sanctimony about its mission, they complained, the GSEs did very little for those who truly needed help. Both John Taylor, the CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and Judy Kennedy, the former Freddie lobbyist in charge of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, complained bitterly about Fannie and Freddie. Repeated studies by HUD showed that the GSEs’ purchases of loans made to lower-income borrowers lagged the market.
That’s not to say Fannie and Freddie did nothing. When Countrywide ginned up its program to provide low-income mortgages, it sold them to Fannie through a special program Fannie had set up to handle such loans. But back then, programs like Countrywide’s were small and highly controlled—experiments, really, and valid ones at that, because they sought an answer to an important question. As Dan Mudd would later ask, “Do you want to live in a country where someone who has a blemish on their credit, or someone who happens to be a minority, can’t get a home? Where do you draw the line?”
Mostly, though, Fannie Mae made no apologies for its stance. “I used to say that the goal at Fannie was to have a seamless yes to anyone who wants to do anything for housing,” Johnson later said. “But we didn’t say yes to crap, to fraud. We were probing the boundaries, but it was carefully circumscribed.