Obama peddles plan to cut Fannie, Freddie

PHOENIX – President Barack Obama on Tuesday got behind a bipartisan push to replace housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a new government approach to mortgage guarantees, criticizing a system that let bailed-out companies profit while taxpayers covered their bad bets.

“As home prices rise, we can’t just reinflate another housing bubble,” Obama told a crowd in Phoenix, a city hit hard by the housing crisis five years ago.

Congress should invest in the recovery of the housing market, he said, while also working to “lay a rock-solid foundation to make sure the kind of crisis we went through never happens again. And one of the key things to make sure it doesn’t happen again is to wind down these companies that are not really government, but not really private sector; they’re known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.”

But even as he endorsed an end to the mortgage giants, which were seized by the government in 2008, the president also vowed to protect the consumer-friendly products they help provide. Obama emphasized the importance of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages popular among middle-class homeowners, which many Democrats said would be threatened by a House Republican bill to overhaul housing finance.

“That’s something families should be able to rely on when they’re making the most important purchase of their lives,” Obama said.

In his most vigorous public attempt to influence housing policy this year, Obama proposed to remake the nation’s troubled housing finance system and deal with the biggest bailout recipients of the crisis. In so doing, he essentially backed a bipartisan bill introduced in June by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Mark R. Warner, D-Va.

Warner said Tuesday that Obama’s support would provide added momentum to the bill.

“Our bipartisan Senate approach protects the taxpayers while maintaining access to affordable mortgage credit,” Warner said. “It also ends the Fannie and Freddie model of private gains and public losses.”

The proposal offers Obama a chance to have his hand in legislative action that effectively condemns the unpopular bailouts of the two companies, the most expensive of those stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.

The measure would phase out the companies over five years and replace them with a new government agency modeled on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The agency would be funded by industry fees and play a much smaller role in guaranteeing mortgages than Fannie and Freddie, former quasi-private companies now under government conservatorship.

The collapse of the subprime housing market pushed Fannie and Freddie near bankruptcy, and the government stepped in to save them. Taxpayers have pumped $187.5 billion into the companies to cover losses. But as the housing market has improved, the companies have paid the government $131.6 billion in dividends.

There’s broad agreement among Democrats and Republicans that the two companies should be shut down as part of an overhaul. But Tuesday was the first time that Obama endorsed a specific approach. As he did, he indirectly rejected a Republican plan passed by the House Financial Services Committee last month that also would shut down Fannie and Freddie but would not replace them with a new government guarantee.

Many Democrats say that would wipe out the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage by making it too expensive. Republicans reject that contention, noting that there still would be government guarantees through other agencies.