The Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a United States government-sponsored enterprise and, since 1968, a publicly traded company.

Since 1938, Fannie Mae has been an innovative force in the mortgage industry. Our mission is to provide a stable source of liquidity for mortgage lending, supporting greater access to affordable home and rental housing finance in all markets, at all times. We help facilitate the flow of capital into the U.S. housing market by issuing and guaranteeing mortgage-related securities. Our work helps make the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage — a mainstay of the U.S. mortgage market — possible.

Our Single-Family business helps lenders originate mortgages in a safe and sound manner. Our funding makes products such as the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage possible. It provides homeowners with stable, predictable mortgage payments over the life of the loan and remains the most popular choice among homebuyers.

We provide lenders with a variety of financing solutions so they can support a diverse group of homebuyers and homeowners in all markets and during all economic cycles. We enable our lender customers to originate and tailor mortgage loans to meet the needs of today's borrower.

At the same time, we establish and uphold responsible lending standards. We’ve put in place strong underwriting, eligibility, and risk management standards to help protect taxpayers.

We provide liquidity to the single-family market by purchasing and guaranteeing mortgage loans that are made by our lender customers and issuing debt securities that attract global investors to finance U.S. housing. In recent years, we have become a company that distributes some of our mortgage credit risk to private investors and, as a result, we are reducing taxpayer risk.

Taken together, we are enabling our customers to extend credit to borrowers across the U.S., helping them to buy, refinance, and rent homes.

Fannie Mae is a market leader in financing for multifamily properties. Our Multifamily business works to ensure that access to affordable and workforce rental housing is available in all markets across the country.

In our Delegated Underwriting and Servicing (DUS®) program, we work with a national network of participating lender customers to finance apartment buildings. What's DUS? It is the cornerstone of the company's multifamily business. Through DUS, lenders share in the risk of the loans they sell to Fannie Mae. DUS is a unique model that leverages private capital to finance multifamily housing in communities throughout America.

We provide liquidity to the multifamily market by transforming multifamily loans into mortgage-backed securities. This increases available funds in the financial system, and helps ensure that there are funds available to finance workforce rental housing.¹⁾

HUD is a Sewer (select sample)

As Assistant Secretary for Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner, I was responsible for the operations of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was the largest mortgage insurance fund in the world. FHA at that time had annual originations of $50-100 billion of mortgage insurance and an outstanding portfolio of $320 billion of mortgage insurance, mortgages and properties. Leading the FHA necessitated significant understanding of how homes are built, how mortgages finance thousands of communities throughout America and how investors finance the process by buying securities in pools of mortgages.

My responsibilities included the production and management of assisted private housing; management of an organization of 7,000 employees in 80 offices nationwide; and development of network information systems and tools. In addition, I served as advisor to the Secretary of HUD on financial markets regulatory responsibilities, including the RTC Oversight Board, Federal Housing Finance Board and Federal Home Loan Bank Board System, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In the process of cleaning up the coinsurance portfolio, I got a chance to learn more about some of the tax-exempt housing bond deals that involved FHA mortgage insurance. Examples of these deals were those done through one of the Connecticut state housing authorities by a Dillon Read banker, Jewelle Bickford, during the 1980s.

Bickford had a lot of support from two of the largest future Dillon Read investors in Cornell Corrections — Ken Schmidt and Birkelund — which was hard for me to fathom. Bickford was one for shortcuts and what sounded to me like more than little white lies. Schmidt shared an intelligence background with Birkelund. He served with Air Force Intelligence early in his career as Birkelund had served in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). When I later realized the role of the intelligence agencies in the HUD portfolio their comfort with HUD deals in Connecticut with high default rates seemed somehow more logical.

After Bickford’s housing bonds were embroiled in the coinsurance crash and burn, Jewelle somehow managed to get promoted up — landing at Birkelund’s old firm, Rothschild Inc. Which always made me wonder exactly whose bank accounts ended up with the $4 billion emptied out of the FHA mutual funds at HUD as a result of coinsurance, not to mention the billions more lost in the single family FHA programs.

Over $2 billion was lost by FHA/HUD in the Texas region in fiscal 1989 alone. The Texas region had included Arkansas, where the state agency, ADFA was so bad they had been disqualified at one point according to the HUD Fort Worth regional leadership. It was this state agency which was alleged to have laundered the local profit share of the arms and drug trafficking channeled through Mena, Arkansas. ²⁾