Business
Freddie Mac's primary method of making money is by charging a guarantee fee on loans that it has purchased and securitized into mortgage-backed security bonds. Investors, or purchasers of Freddie Mac MBS, are willing to let Freddie Mac keep this fee in exchange for assuming the credit risk, that is, Freddie Mac's guarantee that the principal and interest on the underlying loan will be paid back regardless of whether the borrower actually repays.
Both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have spoken publicly in favor of greater regulation of the GSEs, because of the size of their holdings and the widespread perception that they are government backed. Freddie Mac is currently regulated by the HUD and the FHFA. The United States House of Representatives passed HR 1427 (Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007) to consolidate oversight for Freddie, Fannie, and the Federal Home Loan Banks into a single regulator.
Read more about this topic: Freddie Mac
Famous quotes containing the word business:
“...we shall never be the people we should and might be until we have learned that it is the first and most important business of a nation to protect its women, not by any puling sentimentality of queenship, chivalry or angelhood, but by making it possible for them to earn an honest living.”
—Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)
“The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,—chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)