    [House Hearing, 110 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

         THE ROLE OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                             COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
                             AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                           ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                DECEMBER 9, 2008

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 110-180

                                   __________

    Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

      Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
                                   index.html
                          http://www.house.gov/reform

         THE ROLE OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

         THE ROLE OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                             COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
                             AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                           ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                DECEMBER 9, 2008

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 110-180

                                   __________

    Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

      Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
                                   index.html
                          http://www.house.gov/reform

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                  COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

                     HENRY A. WAXMAN, California, Chairman
    EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York             TOM DAVIS, Virginia
    PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania      DAN BURTON, Indiana
    CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York         CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
    ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland         JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
    DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio             JOHN L. MICA, Florida
    DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois             MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
    JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts       TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
    WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri              CHRIS CANNON, Utah
    DIANE E. WATSON, California          JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
    STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts      MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
    BRIAN HIGGINS, New York              DARRELL E. ISSA, California
    JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky            KENNY MARCHANT, Texas
    BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa                LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
    ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of   PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
        Columbia                         VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
    BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota            BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
    JIM COOPER, Tennessee                BILL SALI, Idaho
    CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland           JIM JORDAN, Ohio
    PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire
    CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
    JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland
    PETER WELCH, Vermont
    JACKIE SPEIER, California

                          Phil Barnett, Staff Director
                           Earley Green, Chief Clerk
                   Lawrence Halloran, Minority Staff Director

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------
                                                                       Page
    Hearing held on December 9, 2008.................................     1
    Statement of:
        Pinto, Edward, former chief credit officer, Fannie Mae, and
          real estate financial services consultant; Charles
          Calomiris, Arthur Burns Scholar in international economics,
          American Enterprise Institute; Arnold Kling, adjunct
          scholar, CATO Institute; and Thomas Stanton, fellow, Center
          for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins
          University.................................................   135
            Calomiris, Charles.......................................   220
            Kling, Arnold............................................   201
            Pinto, Edward............................................   135
            Stanton, Thomas..........................................   322
        Syron, Richard, former CEO, Freddie Mac; Daniel Mudd, former
          CEO, Fannie Mae; Leland Brendsel, former CEO, Freddie Mac;
          and Franklin Raines, former CEO, Fannie Mae................    17
            Brendsel, Leland.........................................    31
            Mudd, Daniel.............................................    23
            Raines, Franklin.........................................    37
            Syron, Richard...........................................    17
    Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
        Brendsel, Leland, former CEO, Freddie Mac, prepared statement
          of.........................................................    33
        Calomiris, Charles, Arthur Burns Scholar in international
          economics, American Enterprise Institute, information dated
          October 2, 2008............................................   221
        Kanjorski, Hon. Paul E., a Representative in Congress from
          the State of Pennsylvania, prepared statement of...........    77
        Kling, Arnold, adjunct scholar, CATO Institute, prepared
          statement of...............................................   203
        Lynch, Hon. Stephen F., a Representative in Congress from the
          State of Massachusetts, American Enterprise Institute
          article....................................................    97
        Mudd, Daniel, former CEO, Fannie Mae, prepared statement of..    25
        Pinto, Edward, former chief credit officer, Fannie Mae, and
          real estate financial services consultant, prepared
          statement of...............................................   138
        Raines, Franklin, former CEO, Fannie Mae, prepared statement
          of.........................................................    39
        Stanton, Thomas, fellow, Center for the Study of American
          Government at Johns Hopkins University, prepared statement
          of.........................................................   325
        Syron, Richard, former CEO, Freddie Mac, prepared statement
          of.........................................................    20
        Towns, Hon. Edolphus, a Representative in Congress from the
          State of New York, prepared statement of...................    70
        Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the
          State of California, prepared statement of.................     5

         THE ROLE OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

                                  ----------

                           TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2008

                              House of Representatives,
                  Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in
    room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry A. Waxman
    (chairman of the committee) presiding.
        Present: Representatives Waxman, Towns, Kanjorski, Maloney,
    Cummings, Kucinich, Davis of Illinois, Tierney, Clay, Lynch,
    Yarmuth, Braley, Norton, Cooper, Van Hollen, Murphy, Sarbanes,
    Speier, Burton, Shays, Mica, Souder, Platts, Turner, Issa,
    Westmoreland, McHenry, Foxx, Bilbray, Sali, and Jordan.
        Staff present: Phil Barnett, staff director; Kristin
    Amerling, chief counsel; Karen Lightfoot, communications
    director and senior policy advisor; David Rapallo, chief
    investigative counsel; John Williams, deputy chief
    investigative counsel; Michael Gordon and David Leviss, senior
    investigative counsels; Russell Anello, Stacia Cardille, and
    Margaret Daum, counsels; Alison Cassady and Anna Laitin,
    professional staff members; Earley Green, chief clerk; Jennifer
    Berenholz, assistant clerk; Alexandra Golden, investigator;
    Caren Auchman, communications associate; Zhongrui ``JR'' Deng,
    chief information officer; Leneal Scott, information officer;
    Miriam Edelman, special assistant; Mitch Smiley and Matt
    Weiner, staff assistants; Lawrence Halloran, minority staff
    director; Charles Phillips, minority senior counsel; Brien
    Beattie, Molly Boyl, Christopher Bright, Alex Cooper, Adam
    Fromm, Todd Greenwood, and John Ohly, minority professional
    staff members; Larry Brady and John Cuaderes, minority senior
    investigators and policy advisors; Mark Lavin, minority Army
    fellow; Patrick Lyden, minority parliamentarian and Member
    services coordinator; and Brian McNicoll, minority
    communications director.
        Chairman Waxman. The committee will please come to order.
        Today, we are holding the committee's sixth hearing on the
    financial crisis. To date, we have examined the bankruptcy of
    Lehman Brothers, the fall of AIG, and the role of credit-rating
    agencies. We held a hearing with Federal regulators and one
    with the Nation's most successful hedge fund managers. Today's
    hearing will focus on the collapse of two government-sponsored
    mortgage financing enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
        On September 7th, the Treasury Department took control over
    Fannie and Freddie. The companies have now been given access to
    $200 billion in capital from the Federal Government. Our job
    today is to examine why Freddie and Fannie failed.
        As part of our investigation, the committee obtained nearly
    400,000 documents from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These
    documents show that the companies made irresponsible
    investments that are now costing Federal taxpayers billions of
    dollars.
        One key document is a confidential presentation from the
    files of Fannie Mae's CEO, Daniel Mudd. According to this
    document, the company faced a strategic crossroads in June
    2005. The document states, ``We face two stark choices: one,
    stay the course; or, two, meet the market where the market
    is.'' Staying the course meant focusing predominantly on more
    secure, prime and fixed-rate mortgages. The presentation
    explained that this option would ``maintain our strong credit
    discipline and protect the quality of our book.''
        But, according to the confidential presentation, the real
    revenue opportunity was in buying subprime and other
    alternative mortgages. To pursue this course, the company would
    have to ``accept higher risk and higher volatility of
    earnings.'' This presentation recognized that homes were being
    utilized like an ATM. It acknowledged that investing in
    subprime and alternative mortgages would mean higher credit
    losses and increased exposure to unknown risks, but the lure of
    additional profits proved to be too great.
        The documents make clear that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
    knew what they were doing. Their own risk managers raised
    warning after warning about the dangers of investing heavily in
    the subprime and alternative mortgage market, but these
    warnings were ignored.
        In 2004, Freddie Mac's chief risk officer sent an e-mail to
    CEO Richard Syron urging Freddie Mac to stop purchasing loans
    with no income or asset requirements as soon as practicable.
    The risk officer warned that mortgage lenders were targeting
    borrowers who would have trouble qualifying for a mortgage if
    their financial position were adequately disclosed and that the
    ``potential for the perception and the reality of predatory
    lending with this product is great.'' But, Mr. Syron did not
    accept the chief risk officer's recommendation. Instead, the
    company fired him.
        A year later, on November 10, 2005, a top Fannie Mae
    official warned, ``Our conclusion has consistently been that
    the lowering of risk in many of these private-label securities
    has not adequately been reflected in their pricing.''
        On October 28, 2006, Fannie's chief risk officer sent an e-
    mail to company CEO Daniel Mudd warning about a serious problem
    at the company. He wrote, ``There is a pattern emerging of
    inadequate regard for the control process.'' In another e-mail
    on July 16, 2007, the same risk officer wrote to Mr. Mudd
    again, this time complaining that the Board of Directors had
    been told falsely that ``we have the will and the money to
    change our culture and support taking more credit risk.'' The
    risk officer wrote, ``I have been saying that we are not even
    close to having proper control processes for credit market and
    operational risk. I got a 60 percent budget cut. Do I look
    stupid?''
        But, these warnings were routinely disregarded. In one 2007
    presentation, the management of Fannie Mae told the Board, ``We
    want to go down the credit spectrum. Subprime spreads have
    widened dramatically to their widest level in years. We do not
    feel there is much risk going down to AA and A. We don't expect
    to take losses at AA and A level. Eventually, we want to go to
    BBB. We want to move quickly while the opportunity is still
    here.''
        Taking these risks proved tremendously lucrative for Fannie
    and Freddie's CEOs. They made over $40 million between 2003 and
    2007. But, their irresponsible decisions are now costing the
    taxpayers billions of dollars.
        At an earlier hearing, the minority, Republicans, released
    a report that called Fannie and Freddie ``the central cancer of
    the mortgage market, which has now metastasized into the
    current financial crisis.'' The next day, John McCain made a
    similar statement during a Presidential debate in Nashville,
    stating that, ``Fannie and Freddie were the catalyst, the match
    that started this forest fire.''
        The documents do not support these assertions. The CEOs of
    Fannie and Freddie made reckless bets that led to the downfall
    of their companies. Their actions could cost taxpayers hundreds
    of billions of dollars. But, it is a myth to say they were the
    originators of the subprime crisis. Fundamentally, they were
    following the market, not leading it.
        It is also a myth to blame the Nation's affordable housing
    goals. The bulk of Fannie and Freddie's credit losses, nearly
    $12 billion so far this year, are the result of their purchases
    of Alt-A loans and securities. Because many of these risky
    loans lack full documentation of the borrower's income, they
    did not help the companies meet their affordable housing goals.
        At today's hearing, we will have the opportunity to
    question four former CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and I
    thank them for their cooperation. I also want to thank the
    companies themselves for cooperating with the committee's
    investigation.
        But, I especially want to thank and congratulate the
    members of this committee for their work in this Congress. This
    will be the last full committee hearing we will hold this year,
    and it will be the last Oversight Committee hearing that I will
    chair.
        It has been a tremendous honor to chair this committee. We
    began our oversight efforts in February 2007, with 4 days of
    back-to-back hearings on waste, fraud, and abuse in Federal
    spending. We investigated the missing $8 billion in cash handed
    out in Iraq, the actions of Blackwater's private security
    guards, the politicization of Federal science, high drug
    prices, and CEO pay. We took testimony from Valerie Plame and
    Condoleezza Rice, Kevin Tillman and Donald Rumsfeld, Roger
    Clemens and Brian McNamee, and dozens of corporate and
    government leaders. And our actions were the catalyst for
    legislative changes that will save the taxpayers billions of
    dollars.
        It has been a busy schedule, but the one constant of all of
    this has been the dedication and commitment of the members of
    the committee. Oversight is not easy. To have an impact, you
    have to work hard and know your facts, and that is what the
    Members have done in hearing after hearing. I will always be
    proud of the work of this committee and even prouder of the
    Members with whom I have had the great fortune to serve.
        I know that this committee will do great things next year
    under the leadership of your new chairman and your new ranking
    member. And I want you to know that I will miss being here, and
    it has been a tremendous privilege for me to serve with you.
        And I want to recognize the ranking member of the
    committee, Mr. Issa, for his opening statement.
        [The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]

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        Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Before I begin, I would ask unanimous consent that my
    colleagues from Financial Services, the ranking member, Mr.
    Bachus, and Mr. Garrett of New Jersey, would be permitted to
    participate in this hearing today.
        Chairman Waxman. Without objection, that will be the order.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, I additionally ask unanimous
    consent that documents produced pursuant to the request by the
    committee, including certain e-mails, memorandum, and
    presentations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, be inserted into
    the record of this hearing.
        Chairman Waxman. If you gentlemen would withhold that
    unanimous consent request, we just want to be sure we are
    talking about the same documents.
        Mr. Issa. Of course, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Waxman. Thank you.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, also before I begin, on behalf of
    Ranking Member Tom Davis, who, as you know, has now left the
    Congress just slightly early, I have had the honor of serving
    with you and serving with Mr. Davis for these last 2 years.
    Although we have not always agreed--as a matter of fact, we
    have not often agreed--the elevation of this committee by your
    tireless effort has, in fact, put this committee where it
    should be: at the center of Congress's oversight of this large
    economy, both public and private.
        And, for that, this committee will owe you--and hopefully,
    the picture to be hung soon--a debt of gratitude, because to
    elevate a committee is one of the hardest things in the world
    to do. Many chairmen spend years at the helm of a committee and
    see it reduced or, at best, held the same. But, you truly have
    left this committee much stronger than when you found it. And,
    for that, both sides of the aisle will always be grateful.
        [Applause.]
        Mr. Mica. Mr. Issa, would you yield to me?
        Mr. Issa. And I would yield to the gentleman.
        Mr. Mica. You know, I think one of the reasons Mr. Waxman
    has probably sought the position on Energy and Commerce was to
    escape the claws of Mr. Issa and Mr. Mica. But we wish him well
    in his new endeavor.
        Two things. One, there is no substance, as I told you
    before, to the fact that our steering committee is moving the
    two of us over to that committee. So, that will be very good.
    And, also, could you please keep me posted on the exact date of
    the hanging of Henry Waxman? Because I want to be here for it.
        Thank you.
        Mr. Issa. Thank you.
        Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired--no.
    [Laughter.]
        Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for scheduling this
    important hearing. And thank you, again, for the second panel
    of expert witnesses. That shows a great deal of bipartisan
    cooperation, and, for that, again, I am grateful.
        As we attempt to deal with the ongoing financial crisis, it
    is critical that we look at all the factors that caused the
    collapse of the financial system. The one thing we know for
    certain is that the overinflated housing market and defaulting
    subprime loans are at the center of the problem. And it is no
    secret that I believe that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had
    either the primary role or certainly a primary cause of this
    failure.
        The analogy of the Chicago fire and Mrs. O'Leary's cow is
    particularly appropriate here. The cow was the immediate cause
    of the fire, but there were a number of factors that made the
    fire inevitable. The fire spread quickly because homes were
    densely packed and made of wood. It wasn't a question of
    whether the disaster would happen, but when. I believe that
    Freddie and Fannie had a great deal to do with packing that
    great deal of wood close together for a number of years.
        These two government-sponsored enterprises were repeatedly
    urged by politicians to deliver affordable housing to the
    American people. There was an inevitability in this policy,
    just as the events that led to the Chicago fire. Traditional
    home loans were replaced with easy credit, no-document, and no-
    downpayment loans. Instead of human judgment assessing risk,
    those responsibilities were shifted to rely on computer
    modeling. Outright fraud and greed wasn't isolated to just Wall
    Street, although I appreciate the chairman's work on uncovering
    the portion that was on Wall Street. Fannie and Freddie shared
    in this disgrace as it drove much of the poor decisionmaking
    that have led us to where we are here today.
        Mr. Chairman, the time for double talk, not in this
    committee but outside this committee, is over. Mr. Chairman,
    the election is behind us. So, let us get to the bottom of this
    crisis and find out what really happened. We must work together
    to get to the root causes of this crisis, not just a root
    cause, but all root causes. It is important that we find out
    what factors interacted with each other to bring about the
    degree of financial destruction.
        Of all the work we have done to date, it is inconceivable
    that we have not had any discussion of the role that we played,
    the role that congressionally mandated policies played in this
    crisis. We must ask ourselves, did Congress advocate policies
    that fermented this crisis? Did individual Congressmen and/or -
    women advocate because, in fact, it was a convenient
    relationship, both politically and perhaps personally?
        Some will consider what I am about to say not politically
    correct. A few weeks ago, when the topic of Fannie Mae and
    Freddie Mac affordable housing loans were raised as a cause of
    this crisis, Chairman Barney Frank said it was racist to
    suggest as much. I will say here today, it is not racist to
    suggest anything and everything as a cause of this problem
    until it is properly eliminated by those who are not affected
    directly by it but, in fact, can dispassionately and
    objectively analyze what was or was not a cause of this
    problem.
        In a recent Senate hearing on the automobile bailout,
    Chairman Christopher Dodd continued to point a finger at Wall
    Street as the culprit of the current crisis and many crises.
    Those two men are chairmen of the two most important
    committees, notwithstanding ours, dealing with the financial
    crisis, yet they appear to be wearing blinders in not wanting
    to discuss the full range of issues underlying this crisis.
        Mr. Chairman, the goal of affordable housing is one of the
    most laudable goals we, as legislators, should seek to attain.
    But, we should do it in a way that does not destroy the whole
    financial system, which is, in fact, what has happened.
        Let me draw a contrast. For decades, under the GI Bill of
    Rights, we allowed and encouraged servicemen to get VA home
    loans with little or no money down. And that program, Mr.
    Chairman, works well. What I am saying is that affordable
    housing is a desirable goal, and it can be done the right way.
        But, in the case of the GSEs, how we encourage the program
    is something we have to come to grips with. We have to
    recognize that what we have done with the GSEs hasn't worked.
    Rather, it has allowed the most vulnerable in our society to be
    subject to predatory lenders. We gave hope to people with the
    promise of homeownership without telling them the American
    dream could turn into their personal nightmare. Mr. Chairman,
    we in the Congress have to look in the mirror because part of
    the blame clearly lies at our footsteps.
        I have introduced legislation to establish a 9/11-type
    independent, nonpartisan commission composed of experts, not
    politicians, to assess what went wrong and how the system
    should be remedied. Mr. Chairman, in your new role, I would
    hope that you would sign on in the next Congress as a cosponsor
    of this legislation.
        I believe that this committee and others should continue to
    actively look into the causes. We should, in fact, do our
    oversight role. But, the worst thing Congress can do now is to
    start legislating or advocating for regulation without a clear,
    nonpartisan analysis of what went wrong, including a look
    inward.
        Business Week just ran an article indicating that many of
    the current reworked FHA loans will default in the near future
    and a second bailout will be necessary. Mr. Chairman, for all
    the committees in the Congress, this committee has a unique
    obligation and opportunity to work in a bipartisan way to
    follow the causes of this crisis, both independently and
    through a commission that can provide us with additional
    insight in all directions, including that which comes to our
    footsteps.
        Mr. Chairman, I would hope that we will continue in the
    next Congress to make sure that the Financial Services
    Committee does not supplant this committee in making sure that
    government does what it should do, not only to encourage and
    allow homeownership to all, but, in fact, to protect the
    financial system that today is teetering on the edge of yet
    another precipitous fall.
        If the Congress cannot do this in an objective and
    dispassionate way, then I assure you the minority will continue
    to pull at every possible lever to ensure that we can play a
    constructive role in ensuring that the wood will not be piled
    up again, that homes, whether in Chicago or throughout America,
    will not be built close together and of wood in order to have
    yet another Mrs. O'Leary's fire.
        Mr. Chairman, thank you again for holding this important
    hearing. And I look forward to perhaps you being an original
    cosponsor of the legislation calling for a nonpartisan
    commission in the next Congress.
        Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Issa.
        I'm pleased to introduce our witnesses today.
        We have Leland Brendsel, the former CEO of Freddie Mac. He
    worked at Freddie Mac for 21 years and left the company in June
    2003.
        Daniel Mudd, former CEO of Fannie Mae, served as the
    president and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from June
    2005 until September 2008. Mr. Mudd was also a member of the
    Fannie Mae Board of Directors from February 2000 until
    September 2008.
        Franklin Raines is the former chief executive officer of
    Fannie Mae from 1999 until his retirement in December 2004. He
    previously served as Fannie Mae's vice president from 1991
    until 1996.
        And Richard Syron, a former CEO of Freddie Mac, served as
    the chairman and CEO from December 2003 to September 2008.
        I want to welcome each of you to our hearing today.
        It is the custom of this committee that all Members that
    testify do so under oath. So, I would like to ask, if you
    would, please stand and raise your right hands.
        [Witnesses sworn.]
        Chairman Waxman. The record will indicate that each of the
    witnesses answered in the affirmative.
        Your prepared statements will be in the record in their
    entirety. We will have a clock that will indicate a time for 5
    minutes. At 4 minutes, it will be green. The last minute, it
    will turn orange. And then, when the 5 minutes is up, it will
    turn red. That will be an indication to you that we would like
    you then to conclude your comments. Even though it may not be
    the complete testimony, the whole testimony will already be in
    the record.
        We will start with you, Mr. Syron. Why don't we start with
    you? There is a button on the base of the mic. Be sure to push
    it and have the mic close enough so that it can be picked up.

     STATEMENTS OF RICHARD SYRON, FORMER CEO, FREDDIE MAC; DANIEL
      MUDD, FORMER CEO, FANNIE MAE; LELAND BRENDSEL, FORMER CEO,
        FREDDIE MAC; AND FRANKLIN RAINES, FORMER CEO, FANNIE MAE

                       STATEMENT OF RICHARD SYRON

        Mr. Syron. Thank you, Chairman Waxman and members of the
    committee. Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to
    testify today and address your issues of concern in light of
    the current financial crisis. As you know, I served as CEO of
    Freddie Mac essentially from 2004 to September of this year.
        Let me start with a very basic proposition. Freddie Mac
    was, is and, by law, must be a nondiversified financial
    services company, limited to the business of residential
    mortgages. Given the recent severe nationwide downturn in
    housing market, the only nationwide housing decline in housing
    values since the Great Depression, any company limited
    exclusively to that line of business alone would be severely
    impacted. As Treasury Secretary Paulson recently noted, given
    that GSEs were solely involved in housing, and given the
    magnitude of the housing correction we have had, the losses by
    the GSEs should come as no surprise to anyone.
        With respect to the housing market, the prolonged glut of
    credit certainly was one factor that contributed to the housing
    bubble and its subsequent collapse. Another important factor
    was the shift from a system in which mortgage originators held
    loans to maturity to a system in which mortgage originators
    immediately sold or securitized a loan and retained no risk. In
    more recent years, increasingly complex financial techniques
    were also applied to the process with the objective of
    minimizing, shifting, or, some believed, virtually eliminating
    risk.
        We all recognize that homeownership provides benefits and
    generates substantial social advantages beyond just shelter. We
    have learned the hard way, however, that the rapid expansion of
    homeownership is not without risk and ultimately not without
    cost if the choices made by individual homeowners are
    unaffordable.
        What was the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the
    credit crisis? These institutions were established by Congress
    to promote liquidity, affordability, and stability in housing
    finance. They do so primarily by guaranteeing the timely
    payment of principle and interest on mortgages originated by
    banks in order to facilitate the purchase of those mortgages by
    institutional investors, thereby enabling banks to make new
    loans. Congress has reaffirmed this role for Fannie and Freddie
    many times, including quite recently.
        When the dramatic and widespread downturn in housing prices
    occurred, the pressures on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were
    enormous. The GSEs are a nondiversified business focused solely
    on residential housing in the United States. As the guarantor
    of almost half the home mortgages in the country, it is not
    surprising that these two firms would get hit hard by the
    biggest housing collapse in 75 years. This lack of
    diversification was extremely challenging for the GSEs, even
    though their credit standards were higher than other lenders.
        There has been a lot of attention in the media and
    elsewhere to the problems associated with the nontraditional or
    subprime market. There is no question that Freddie Mac has
    incurred losses associated with nontraditional loans. But, it
    is important to remember that Freddie and its sister
    institution, Fannie, did not create the subprime market, I
    think as the chairman said. Freddie was, in fact, a late
    entrant into the nontraditional, i.e. non-30-year-fixed-rate
    conventional market, such as Alt-A.
        The subprime market was developed largely by private-label
    participants, as were most nontraditional mortgage products.
    Freddie Mac entered the nontraditional slice of the market
    because, as the private lending sector shifted toward those
    type of loans, Freddie needed to participate in order to carry
    out its public mission of promoting affordability, stability,
    and liquidity in housing finance. In addition, if it had not
    done so, it could not have remained competitive or even
    relevant in the residential mortgage market we were designed to
    serve. Moreover, if you're going to take the mission of
    providing low-income lending seriously, then, by definition,
    you're going to take a somewhat greater level of risk.
        Freddie's delinquency rates and default rates, both overall
    and for each type of loan, were much lower than those of the
    market overall and were especially lower than for mortgages
    underwritten by purely private institutions, many of which were
    severely impaired for some of the same reasons as Fannie and
    Freddie. Every institution with significant exposure to
    residential mortgages has been negatively impacted by the
    generally unforeseen magnitude and volatility and rapidity in
    the collapse of the housing price market.
        Before I conclude, I just want to take a moment to recall
    the public mission of the GSEs. As everyone is aware, Freddie
    Mac is a shareholder-owned corporation, chartered for the
    purpose of supporting America's mortgage finance markets and
    operating under government mandates. We had obligations to
    Congress and to the public to promote our chartered purposes of
    increasing affordability, liquidity, and stability in housing
    finance, which included some very specific low-income housing
    goals. But, we also had obligations to our regulator to pursue
    our goals in a manner that was prudent and reasonable. At the
    same time, we had the fiduciary obligation to our shareholders
    that were identical to any other publicly traded company.
        Freddie Mac always worked hard to balance these multiple
    objectives, and for decades, the company was effective. There
    is much to be said about the success of the GSE model, and
    those successes should not be totally overlooked because of the
    current crisis. As Congress looks to the future of residential
    housing finance, the GSEs can and should play an important
    role.
        I would be pleased to answer your questions about my time
    at Freddie Mac and any lessons that might be learned. Thank
    you, sir.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Syron follows:]

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        Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Syron.
        Mr. Mudd.

                        STATEMENT OF DANIEL MUDD

        Mr. Mudd. Mr. Chairman, Representative Issa, members of the
    committee, thank you all for the opportunity to appear before
    you this morning. My name is Daniel Mudd. I joined Fannie Mae
    in 2000, following a decade at General Electric. I served
    consecutively as chief operating officer and interim chief
    executive officer of Fannie Mae.
        In June 2005, the Board of Directors, with the approval of
    our regulator, asked me to stay on as CEO, complete the
    accounting restatement, work cooperatively with our regulator,
    remediate a number of control weaknesses, and restore the
    company's position and standing in the capital markets. The
    company made significant progress in these areas, returning to
    timely and current filings with the SEC, settling matters with
    OFHEO and the SEC, meeting housing goals, and earning $13.3
    billion of net income from 2005 through mid-2007. I also worked
    with Members of this Congress to support legislation passed
    into law in July to create a strong world-class regulator for
    the GSEs.
        As background, I believe the roots of this crisis go back
    to the enormous increase in consumer and commercial leverage in
    the 1990's. The trend built up through 2007, when the financial
    sector entered what most observers view as the worst conditions
    ever seen in the capital markets.
        The GSEs were chartered by Congress to provide liquidity,
    affordability, and stability to the mortgage market at all
    times. In fact, in the midst of the present turmoil, when other
    companies decided not to invest, the GSEs were specifically
    charged to take up the slack. This had worked in several
    recessions, the Russian debt crisis of 1998, the aftermath of
    9/11, but not--not--in 2008. The housing market went into a
    free-fall, with some predicting a decline now of as much as 30
    percent from peak to trough. A business model requiring a
    company to continue to support the entire market could not
    work.
        Through the spring and summer of this year, my colleagues
    and I worked with government officials, regulators, our
    customers in the banking system, housing advocates, and others
    to maintain what was really an excruciating balance between
    providing liquidity to keep the market functioning, protecting
    Fannie Mae regulatory capital, and advancing the interest of
    the company's owners. At the time the government declared
    conservatorship over the company, we were still maintaining
    regulatory capital in accord with all relevant standards, and
    we were still, along with Freddie Mac, the principal source of
    financing to the mortgage market.
        While I deeply respect the myriad challenges facing the
    Treasury Department and the regulator, I did not believe that
    conservatorship was the best solution in the case of Fannie
    Mae. I believe that more modest government support, basically a
    program something like the banks are now eligible for, would
    have maintained a better model. Admittedly, it would not have
    been a magic bullet, but this market seems to defy magic
    bullets, whether they are fired by the private sector or by the
    government.
        In any case, I think that is now water under the bridge,
    and the GSEs, like many other institutions, are stuck mid-
    crisis. I would, therefore, advocate moving the GSEs out of no
    man's land. Events have shown--events have certainly shown me--
    how difficult it is to balance financial, capital, market,
    housing, shareholder, bond holder, homeowner, public and
    private interests in a crisis of these proportions. We should
    examine whether the economy and the markets are better served
    by fully private or fully public GSEs. I hope we have a debate
    on the future structure of the housing finance market in the
    country before events themselves produce a fait accompli that
    answers this question.
        It is possible, I think, in all of this, to forget the many
    positive achievements of the GSEs. We finance tens of millions
    of homes to Americans of low to moderate income. We made
    mortgages fairer, more transparent, and available to a broader
    spectrum of society. We developed colorblind underwriting. We
    assured the banking system that their loans would garner a
    predictable price, around the globe, 24 by 7. When asked by
    Congress and the administration, we stepped up and provided the
    only source of funding for loans in high-cost areas and
    elsewhere.
        Let me end by suggesting that homeownership does remain a
    central dream for many Americans. I believe that, once the
    present crisis resolves itself, owning a home will again be a
    way for Americans to express confidence in their future.
        Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Mudd follows:]

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        Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Brendsel.

                      STATEMENT OF LELAND BRENDSEL

        Mr. Brendsel. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Representative Issa,
    and other distinguished members of the committee. I am Leland
    Brendsel, and I was formally the chairman and chief executive
    officer of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., more commonly
    referred to as Freddie Mac. And I want to thank you for the
    opportunity to address this committee as you consider the
    future of the government-sponsored enterprises and their
    importance to housing finance system in the United States of
    America.
        I believe that we have had the best housing finance system
    in the world and that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been
    vital to its success, and they are vital to its future. In
    particular, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been instrumental
    in ensuring the continued availability of long-term fixed-rate
    mortgage loans. And I hope this hearing and future examinations
    will examine the critical importance of those mortgage loans
    and Freddie Mac's and Fannie Mae's essential role.
        Before I do go further, I want to provide a little
    information on my background. I joined Freddie Mac in 1982 and
    devoted 21 years of my life to it. I left Freddie Mac in June
    2003 after more than two decades of service, and I have not had
    any role in the company now for over 5\1/2\ years.
        I do feel very fortunate to have been the leader of such a
    great company with such an important public mission. I was
    raised on a family farm in South Dakota, attended public
    schools in the Sioux Falls area. And after that, I graduated
    from the University of Colorado and ultimately earned a Ph.D.
    in financial economics from Northwestern University in Illinois
    in 1974. I spent 8 years teaching and working as an economist,
    first at the Farm Credit Administration here in Washington and
    later at the Federal Home Loan Bank in Iowa.
        But, as I mentioned, I spent the bulk of my career at
    Freddie Mac. When I joined it in 1982, I served as Freddie
    Mac's chief financial officer, and then I assumed the role of
    chief executive officer in 1985. I was elected chairman of the
    Board beginning in 1989 at the time that Freddie Mac became
    publicly owned and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
        By the time I left Freddie Mac in 2003, the secondary
    mortgage market had become a major source of stability and
    reliability for financing housing and homeownership. Indeed,
    this is a tribute to the wisdom of Congress in chartering
    Freddie Mac with the mission of increasing the availability and
    affordability of mortgage credit by tapping the world's capital
    markets.
        Today, many homeowners and the secondary markets certainly
    are in distress. Congress is rightly considering many proposals
    for restoring stability. And, in doing so, I hope that Congress
    will take steps, as it has in the past, to assure the continued
    availability and affordability of long-term fixed-rate mortgage
    loans. These mortgages have not contributed in any meaningful
    way to the present crisis, but their survival is in jeopardy
    because of it.
        Freddie Mac was chartered in 1970 by Congress to provide
    stability and liquidity to the secondary market for residential
    mortgages. When I began at Freddie Mac in 1982, the secondary
    market was an embryonic market, and the company was still a
    small participant in it. At that time, in 1982, savings and
    loan associations and thrift institutions were still the
    primary mortgage lenders, they were portfolio lenders, but many
    of them had recently failed or were failing. The housing and
    mortgage markets were in turmoil, and the homeownership rates,
    in fact, were declining at that time.
        A family trying to buy a home was faced with mortgage rates
    that swung between 13 and 17 percent alone for 30-year fixed-
    rate mortgage loans over the course of 1982. Because there was
    not widespread access to the national financial markets, the
    availability of mortgages depended on the amount of local bank
    deposits that could be loaned. In addition, the mortgage
    application and underwriting process was arbitrary,
    inconsistent. There were large regional disparities in the
    mortgage market, and too frequently, the process disfavored
    minority and rural communities.
        During the 1980's and 1990's, Freddie Mac played a major
    role in addressing the deficiencies in the mortgage markets.
    Freddie Mac broadened the potential sources of financing for
    residential loans. We helped preserve the 30-year fixed-rate
    mortgage, which had fallen out of favor with many portfolio
    lenders. We drove down origination costs, made it more
    efficient. We improved the speed, reliability, and fairness of
    the underwriting process. And we increased access to mortgages
    for minorities and underserved communities. As a result, one of
    which I am proud, by 2001, 2 years before I left, Freddie Mac
    had answered Congress's call by financing homes for 30 million
    Americans.
        I still care deeply about Freddie Mac and its mission, and
    I share the committee's concern about how to best protect
    America's homeowners and communities. I thank the committee for
    the opportunity to be here today.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Brendsel follows:]

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        Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Brendsel.
        Mr. Raines. Wait a second, until the bell stops. OK, now.

                      STATEMENT OF FRANKLIN RAINES

        Mr. Raines. Thank you. Chairman Waxman, Mr. Issa, and
    distinguished members of the committee, my name is Franklin
    Raines. And I would like to thank the chairman for accepting my
    longer written testimony as part of the record.
        I've worked in the financial services and investment
    industry for 27 years. I have had 12 years' experience in
    investment banking and 11 years of experience in the mortgage
    industry as vice chairman and chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae. I
    was appointed chairman and CEO by an independent board of
    directors, with 13 of its 18 members elected by public
    shareholders.
        In my 6 years as chairman and CEO, Fannie Mae provided over
    $3.4 trillion of financing, serving more than 30 million low-,
    moderate- and middle-income families. The company's revenue,
    book of business, and economic value more than doubled during
    this period, and the stock outperformed the S&P 500.
        On December 21, 2004, I announced my retirement from Fannie
    Mae, and I've had no management role at the company since that
    time. My experience in financial services, along with my tenure
    as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, will
    form the basis for much of my testimony today.
        The current financial crisis has a variety of complex
    sources. However, in my view, it did not result from Fannie
    Mae's recent risk management decisions or from its accounting
    practices 4 years ago. There is no doubt that the crisis
    afflicting the national and international financial system is
    without precedence since the Great Depression. Yet, the Federal
    Government's response, while large in dollars, has had limited
    success.
        Financial market convulsions are not a new phenomena. The
    past quarter-century alone has witnessed the junk bond
    meltdown, the Internet stock implosion, and several others,
    including the present mortgage and credit derivatives crisis.
    These separate events have many features in common that I have
    outlined in my written statement.
        Fannie Mae managed to avoid the major causes of the current
    crisis through 2004. The company had significant experience
    during the 1980's and early 1990's with the impact of falling
    housing prices on the value of mortgages. The company was also
    quite familiar with the different credit performance
    characteristics of mortgages with certain features, such as
    adjustable rates or negative amortization; with certain
    underwriting approaches, such as no documentation of assets or
    income; and with certain borrower types, such as marginal
    credit or housing speculators. The company undertook the
    quantitative research in the 1990's that showed all these
    features created greater credit risk.
        As a result, Fannie Mae developed tools to evaluate and
    manage the new types of mortgages that had begun to come on the
    market in the early part of this decade. As subprime and Alt-A
    loans began to grow as a share of the overall mortgage market,
    the risk management restrictions Fannie Mae had in place
    limited the company's involvement with those products. And, as
    a result, in 2004, the company's share of the overall secondary
    market plummeted.
        The company's public disclosures demonstrate that the
    credit risk profile of Fannie Mae changed after 2004. Fannie
    Mae, like a lot of smart investors, expanded its appetite for
    credit risk. However, it is important to note that, rather than
    lead the market toward looser credit standards, Fannie Mae
    generally resisted pressures to significantly lower its
    standards until about 2006.
        There have been many assertions by commentators about the
    role of affordable housing lending regulation and financial
    services regulators as causes of the current financial crisis.
    There was no regulation that forced banks or GSEs to acquire
    loans that were so risky they imperiled the safety and
    soundness of the institution. The riskiest loans in the system
    tended to be originated by lenders not covered by the Community
    Reinvestment Act or the GSE affordable housing goals. On the
    other hand, the absence of consumer protection regulation
    allowed many bad loans to be made to the detriment of
    consumers.
        The question remains, why did the regulators of banks and
    the GSEs not criticize or restrict the acquisition of risky
    loans by regulated institutions? It is remarkable that, during
    the period that Fannie Mae substantially increased its exposure
    to credit risk, its regulator made no visible effort to enforce
    any limits. This was true even though the regulator only
    oversaw two companies, had greatly increased its budget, and
    was then enforcing a form of quasi-conservatorship on the
    company.
        Preventing future crises in the financial services industry
    and their attendant damage to consumers will require three
    things, in my judgment. First, executives will have to exercise
    greater discipline in managing risk. Second, there needs to be
    a better-informed regulation of large, leveraged financial
    entities. And third, there must be greater protection of
    consumers from financial products they cannot be reasonably
    expected to understand.
        Finally, Mr. Chairman, the GSE model is not perfect.
    However, if we maintain the public goal of marshalling private
    capital to achieve the public purpose of homeownership and
    affordable rental housing, it will be hard to find a model that
    has more benefits and fewer demerits than the model that worked
    reasonably well for almost 70 years at Fannie Mae.
        It has been almost 4 years since my decisions have had any
    impact on Fannie Mae, the housing market, or the global market
    for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Even so, I
    continue to believe in the mission Congress gave to Fannie Mae
    and Freddie Mac. I also believe these companies can play an
    important role in helping to solve today's mortgage financing
    crisis.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to answer any
    questions the committee might have.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Raines follows:]

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        Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Raines. We
    appreciate your testimony.
        Before we go to questions by the members of the committee,
    I would like to ask unanimous consent that all Members may be
    permitted to enter an opening statement into the record. And,
    without objection, that will be the order.
        By a previous agreement with the minority, I would ask
    unanimous consent that we start off the questioning with 12
    minutes on the Democratic side and 12 minutes on the Republican
    side before we then go to the 5-minute rule. And, without
    objection, that will be the order.
        The Chair, starting the questions for our side, would yield
    10 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Tierney.
        Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        And before I start my questions, I just want to take one
    moment and appreciate your services here as chairman. I share
    with Mr. Issa the observation that you have lifted the stature
    of this committee substantially, and all the Members and the
    staff are grateful for that.
        When you were in the minority as the ranking member, you
    certainly made every attempt and were successful in refocusing
    the Congress and the committee on important matters. As
    chairman, you have focused on a number of important matters
    that were essential to the country and to the Congress. Now,
    you bring your duties and your skills over to the Commerce
    Committee at our loss but, I think, the Nation and Congress's
    benefit.
        And so we thank you very much, and I've been proud to serve
    with you.
        Chairman Waxman. The gentleman will be given the full 10
    minutes. [Laughter.]
        Mr. Tierney. I thank all of you gentlemen for being here
    this morning and working with us on this.
        Mr. Mudd, if you might, I would like to ask you a couple of
    questions, in particular about a document that we found in your
    internal files at Fannie Mae. It says, ``A single family
    guarantee business facing strategic crossroads,'' dated in June
    2005. And it is listed as confidential and highly restricted.
        I'd like to get your responses to it. We have some slides
    up there, if you find that helpful, sir.
        The first slide in this says, ``The risk in the environment
    has accelerated dramatically,'' and the bullets under that say
    that there has been a proliferation of higher-risk alternative
    mortgage products, there is a growing concern about housing
    bubbles, there is a growing concern about borrowers taking on
    increased risk and higher debt, and lenders have engaged in
    aggressive risk layering.
        The next slide, if we switch over on that, says the growth
    in adjustable-rate mortgages continues at an aggressive pace.
    And here the presentation says that there has been an emphasis
    on the lowest possible payment, and homes are being utilized
    more like an ATM.
        It appears, Mr. Mudd, that you were aware of both the
    accelerating risk in this environment, as well as the concerns
    about housing bubbles as far back as 2005. Is that correct?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes.
        Mr. Tierney. The next slide says, ``We are at a strategic
    crossroads, and we face two stark choices. One is stay the
    course, and the other is meet the market where the market is.''
    The next slide shows the benefits of staying the course. It
    says, ``Fannie could maintain our strong credit discipline, it
    would protect the quality of the book, it would intensify our
    public voice on concerns about the housing bubble and
    accelerating risk, and, most importantly, it would preserve
    capital.''
        The next slide shows the other alternative, meet the market
    where the market is. In other words, you would meet current
    consumer and customer demands for alternative mortgage
    products. This was viewed as a revenue opportunity and a growth
    area. But, under the alternative, you accept higher risk and
    higher volatility of earnings.
        And the next slide puts these pros and cons side by side.
    If you stay the course, you'll have lower revenues and slower
    growth, but you will have more security. On the other hand, if
    you invest in riskier mortgages, you have potential for high
    revenues and faster growth. But, as the slide says, you also
    have increased exposure to unknown risks.
        Based on these slides, Mr. Mudd, you faced a fundamental
    decision in 2005: Do you keep your focus on the more secure
    fixed-rate mortgages but potentially lose out on some profits,
    or do you compete with private lenders by entering into riskier
    sectors of the market?
        It doesn't seem that there was any real question that you
    were aware that you were increasing your risk significantly by
    entering the market. Is that correct?
        Mr. Mudd. No, it is not exactly correct, Congressman.
        Mr. Tierney. Now, the document indicates that you were
    aware that you were increasing your risk. You're saying that
    you weren't aware you were increasing your risk?
        Mr. Mudd. Well, if I might give you a response in context,
    the process and what we were doing at that time was thinking
    through what our various alternatives were, in terms of the
    marketplace. The choice, as you do in corporations or other
    institutions, was presented relatively starkly in order to
    identify what the key issues were, but, in fact, the real
    choice that was made on the ground was not, do you do A, do you
    do B, do you do black, do you do red. The choice was, rather,
    what are the pros and cons of this decision, to make clear what
    the choices were.
        Mr. Tierney. And that is reflected in that document.
        Mr. Mudd. Yes, sir.
        Mr. Tierney. And one of those is that you are increasing
    your risk significantly by entering that market, if you were to
    enter that market.
        Mr. Mudd. If you were to make the full B decision--and that
    is not, in fact, what we did. So, your choice was, how far do
    you adjust from where you are to meet the market, ultimately?
        Mr. Tierney. It looks as if you made the choice to enter
    the alternative market. But, let me put up two more slides, and
    we'll discuss it.
        The first slide we are going to put up is the
    recommendation that was made in 2005 based on all the factors
    you just talked about. It starts by admitting that
    realistically we are not in a position to meet the markets, and
    that is because you had less experience with the riskier loans
    and you didn't have enough data to evaluate the credit risk.
    The slide says, ``Therefore, we recommend that we pursue a
    stay-the-course strategy.'' However, the slide at the bottom
    recommends that you dedicate resources and funding to,
    ``underground efforts'' to develop a subprime infrastructure
    and modeling for alternative markets.
        The last slide says this: ``If we do not seriously invest
    in these underground-type efforts, we risk becoming a niche
    player, becoming less of a market leader, and becoming less
    relevant to the secondary market.''
        So, Mr. Mudd, I reviewed your written statement, and I
    listened to what you had to say here today. You didn't seem to
    take any acknowledgement that you may have made some mistakes.
    And looking back in hindsight and directed by the slide that we
    just saw, you may not have led the market--and I really believe
    that is true; you didn't lead the market into the situation--
    but you faced a choice of whether to enter it, and it appears
    to me that you made the choice to enter that market, and that
    was a wrong decision.
        Do you agree that was the wrong decision to make?
        Mr. Mudd. No, sir. And what I would point to on this slide
    is the phrase that says we need to invest in these efforts if--
    and if the market changes prove to be secular. And the context
    I would point out to you on that was: We weren't sure. We
    weren't sure whether those changes in the marketplace were
    secular or whether they were cyclical, was it temporary or was
    it a permanent change in the market.
        And we thought it was important that we couldn't afford to
    make the bet that the changes were not going to be permanent.
    We couldn't afford to make the bet that somebody who has a
    subprime mortgage, who, at the end of the day, is simply an
    American with a credit blemish, would never be able to get a
    loan in the country if the Fannie Mae approach, Fannie Mae
    standards, Fannie Mae qualities couldn't be applied there.
        So, when we looked at the market, we made a tradeoff
    between the choices, and we said, no, we are going to focus
    back on our bread and butter, but we're going to do this work
    to make sure we understand these new emerging markets and we
    can develop a better view of them.
        Mr. Tierney. But, in actuality, starting in 2005, you
    actually purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of those
    loans, correct?
        Mr. Mudd. No, sir. I think it is important in that to break
    out the various categories of loans, because, in your question,
    you were asking about ARM loans, which were adjustable-rate
    mortgages, which many of us have; Alt-A loans, which are an
    alternative to an A loan, different documentation than an A
    loan; and subprime loans, which are a different matter
    entirely.
        Going back through those, 85 percent of the book at Fannie
    Mae was standard A loans, the basic loans that had been done
    throughout time. A percentage around 10 percent or so was in
    the Alt-A category. And a much smaller percentage that never
    amounted to more than a percent or two of this total book was
    actually in subprime.
        Mr. Tierney. I think, Mr. Mudd, that it's important that we
    make a distinction between the Alt-A and the subprime on that.
    And I think because some of the rhetoric that we have heard
    back and forth here, the subprime, as you said, was a very
    small part of the portfolio?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes.
        Mr. Tierney. All right. Explain for us the Alt-A. You
    didn't really get any credit, did you, on meeting your goals
    for affordable housing by buying the Alt-As because, in my
    understanding, they are not really clarified as to just what
    the basis of those loans are?
        Mr. Mudd. I'm sorry. I missed the end of your question.
        It would depend on whether the actual character of the loan
    met the socio-economic categories that would count toward a
    goal per se. On their face, they might or might not count. The
    Alt-A loans were essentially a subset of overall A loans. As I
    indicated, Alt-A means an alternative to an A loan. So, they
    bear many of the same characteristics. Otherwise, they
    qualified or counted--they might or might not count toward
    those affordable housing goals.
        The market produced those loans, and Fannie Mae's
    participation in those loans, in fact, goes all the way back to
    2000. We were doing, starting in the year 2000, $10 billion, up
    to 2003 about $100 billion, of Alt-A loans, down to $79 billion
    in 2005. I could go on. But, those loans varied in terms of
    what the market was producing, as did the balance between
    fixed-rate loans.
        Mr. Tierney. June 2005 was when you decided to go into Alt-
    A's a little more heavily, right?
        Mr. Mudd. We decided to examine the market more carefully.
    In 2004, we were doing a rate of about $63 billion. In 2006, we
    were up to $106 billion, and in 2007, $198 billion.
        Mr. Tierney. Up in 2005. And in this year, substantially
    the largest part of your losses come from your Alt-A loans,
    right?
        Mr. Mudd. I am not completely up to date on the figures,
    Congressman. But, I think that, of a single segment of the
    book--the largest losses come from Alt-A. But, the predominance
    of the book, the old A rate, 85 percent of the book is also
    producing about half of the loans, as the housing market has
    gone down by 35 percent.
        Mr. Tierney. Let me sum up. I don't think that Fannie Mae
    or Freddie Mac caused the slide, but the facts also indicate
    that you bear some responsibility for aggravating it, some
    responsibility for accepting those risks, knowing that those
    risks were not insignificant--in fact, they were substantial--
    and plunging into that market, sort of following the Wall
    Street gang into that market. I think we are all going to pay
    the price for that, and we are going to have to deal with that
    now.
        Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Tierney.
        Mr. Issa.
        Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I look at all four of you, and the one thing that I seem to
    find is that all four of you still seem to be in complete
    denial that Freddie and Fannie are in any way responsible for
    this. Your testimony says you are not accepting any blame for
    this at all. You are either standing behind the mandate of the
    Congress or the mandate of your stockholders, perhaps the
    mandate of your bonus packages.
        And you are telling us that, in fact, everyone was doing
    it. Your whole excuse for going to risky and unreasonable loans
    that are defaulting at an incredibly high rate is, ``Everyone
    is doing it. If we don't do it, we will be left out.'' Well, I
    am sorry that you wanted to be the most popular girl in the
    school, and you forgot what your mother told you about your
    activities.
        Mr. Mudd, you seem to have the clearest reason. And with
    Mr. Tierney's questions, you seem to be able to clearly
    articulate something I would like to have all four of you
    acknowledge today: that, in fact, there are compliant A
    conventional--I met the criteria loan--and then there were all
    others, Alt-A and subprime being the two best known of those.
    Is that correct?
        Mr. Mudd. What I was hoping to describe, Congressman, was
    that the loans exist in a spectrum. And at the, sort of, core,
    heart and soul of the spectrum would be A loans. And the market
    operates, if you might imagine, in a series of concentric
    circles around that. The further out you go, the riskier the
    loans are.
        Mr. Issa. What I would like to do today--and we'll grapple
    with this for the next 2 years--is, Alt-A and subprime are
    substantially the same. You get credit if they are in
    underserved areas. And, in fact, since my understanding of a
    subprime is, if you have a FICO score of less than 660, you are
    essentially subprime, and a great many of Alt-A not only had a
    credit score of less than 660's but they didn't tell you what
    their income was, or they told you, but they didn't prove it.
        Now, that creates an Alt-A that is an Alt-A, but it is also
    a subprime. Isn't that true?
        Mr. Mudd. The way I would answer the question, Congressman,
    is that the combination of features in the loan defines the
    type of loan it is. So, yes, in the market, there are Alt-A
    subprime loans, and in the market, there are high-FICO subprime
    loans. Any of those things is possible, depending on the
    combination of the borrowers and the product features.
        Mr. Issa. So, it is relatively fair, for those of us who
    don't do this every day, that this is a distinction without a
    real difference, relative to the default, relative to the
    problem, to the extent that these practices are part of the
    problem. They are reasonably equally part of the problem,
    because today they are equally part of the default; is that
    reasonably fair?
        Can I get a consensus that--remembering that none of you
    said that you were part of the problem, but they are defaulting
    at substantially the same rate. Is that correct?
        Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. I believe that it is more likely that the more
    variable features or the more credit characteristics that apply
    to a loan, those things can aggregate to increase the risk in
    that loan, yes.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Raines, in your testimony, you said that
    Fannie Mae did not contribute significantly to the housing
    collapse. You acknowledge that your former company holds $300
    billion of Alt-A, which do not verify the borrower's income.
        Now, if those are defaulting and, in fact, were defaulting
    at a time in which unemployment was still at a historic low,
    then wouldn't the failure to verify income be a leading part of
    why you would have a default in a loan that, if the person's
    income was, in fact, honestly stated, they would be able to
    maintain? Meaning, if they didn't lie, they would make the
    payments and they wouldn't be in default. Isn't that true?
        Mr. Raines. It is a very complex question that you----
        Mr. Issa. Trust me, I spent a lot of time making sure it
    was as simple as can be.
        If, in fact, unemployment was still at a historic low level
    when Alt-A's began defaulting but housing had stopped its
    precipitous rise, wouldn't you say, by any reasonable
    assessment, that, in fact, the liars getting loans was a
    significant part of it? Because those people, records are
    showing more and more, counted on a rise in value to make those
    loans, rather than a falsely stated income.
        Mr. Raines. I think that is correct. I think that the
    experience with Alt-A loans in that period--again, this is
    after I had left--and the period 2006-2007 was affected by
    fraud, where people did not tell the truth about their assets
    or their income and they obtained mortgages that they otherwise
    wouldn't have qualified for.
        Mr. Issa. So, here, today, if we take with us one take-
    with, if you will, wouldn't it be fair to say, in retrospect--
    and I appreciate the fact that you had mixed signals sent from
    Congress and others. If you had it to do all over again,
    particularly Alt-A, but to a certain extent subprime, wouldn't
    you, if you could have, ensured that people who were looking
    for a home greater than, in retrospect, they could afford, if
    it didn't go up in value, had been sent back to go find a home
    they could afford rather than the one they chose? Isn't that at
    the root of why we are here today?
        You know, the demise of various financial institutions
    didn't start until the default started. We can appreciate the
    default is the beginning of this problem. So if default is the
    beginning of this problem, and default began--and I was with
    Mr. Kucinich in Cleveland well before this became described as
    a crisis: unemployment low, housing prices simply no longer
    going up, defaults begin to escalate.
        In retrospect, would each of you say, both as observers and
    almost current CEOs, that, in fact, had people been told to go
    back and find a home they could better afford, thus not
    ratcheting down people to a liar mortgage, that this crisis
    could have been reduced or averted?
        And I will take a ``yes'' from everyone and walk away
    happy.
        Mr. Brendsel. I would like to comment on that.
        Mr. Issa. Although I will take first, the yeses.
        Mr. Brendsel. I think the failure to underwrite a mortgage
    loan properly is certainly at the core of what could be default
    on that mortgage loan. So, the question is, to what are the
    underwriting requirements?
        So, certainly making a mortgage loan to someone that can't
    afford that mortgage loan or who might be surprised by big
    payment shock down the road, a lender or investor in that
    mortgage loan has to be very cautious about that and, in my
    view, should do everything they can to at least educate the
    marketplace as to what is a sound mortgage loan and what is
    not.
        With regard to documentation, that is a second question as
    to failure to document or to verify someone's income, which,
    again, I think a responsible lender should do.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Raines, would you concur with that?
        Mr. Raines. I concur with what Mr. Brendsel just said, that
    underwriting standards, proper underwriting standards could
    have avoided many of the losses that were experienced on loans
    that were originated in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
        Mr. Issa. Would that pretty well summarize the other two?
        We are looking back to make sure this doesn't happen again.
    Generally, those are the lessons we need to take with us for
    future legislation and messages to your former organizations.
        Is that right? Is it?
        Mr. Mudd. If you could go back and look at the loans that
    were made and pick out the ones that are delinquent or
    defaulted or too close to the loan-to-value ratio, yes,
    absolutely.
        Mr. Issa. Thank you.
        I reserve the balance of my time.
        Chairman Waxman. Mr. Towns, you are recognized for 5
    minutes.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
        Also, let me join in saying that it has been a delight
    working with you. And, of course, I am happy to know that you
    are not leaving the Congress, and we will still be able to
    continue to work with you, probably in a different capacity, of
    course. So, again, you provided excellent leadership, and you
    have done a lot of major things for this committee, and, of
    course, we are very grateful for that. We look forward to
    seeing you on the other committee.
        And, also, let me thank you for holding this hearing. I
    think it is very, very important that we have this hearing.
        Let me just begin by saying, since the crisis started, I
    just want to ask all of you, we have heard some people claim
    that poor people are to blame for this. That is the problem,
    they are saying. And the way this argument goes, the Federal
    Government forced the banks to give mortgages when they
    shouldn't have--this is what they say--to people who were not
    creditworthy, then forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up
    those bad mortgages.
        And you are the experts here. Is that the main reason that
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to be taken over, because they
    made too much financing available to low-income homeowners? Is
    that the problem?
        Let me just run right down the line.
        Mr. Syron. Sir, I think the main reason for the problems
    with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, these are organizations that
    were not diversified and faced the most violent correction and
    the largest correction in 75 years in housing prices, which is,
    we were in the business of ensuring housing prices, in effect,
    when that happened.
        I would think that it wasn't mostly trying to do things for
    poor people. I do think that we have to realize that we need a
    balanced housing program. And I personally am in favor of, in a
    progressive sort of way, good rental housing that people can
    have while they are getting ready to become homeowners.
        Thank you, sir.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. I would just observe, Congressman, that when the
    market goes down, it is the folks who are the closest to the
    margin who get hurt first and longest every time. And that is
    what has produced the great human tragedy of this, which is the
    crisis of foreclosures in a lot of the towns and cities across
    the country.
        Fannie Mae's business was to be able to provide lending all
    across the spectrum of affordable housing. And, as part of
    that, you had individuals who are in those communities. And
    now, and during my time, the company is doing everything it
    could to try to stem that wave of foreclosures and difficulties
    in those communities.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Brendsel.
        Mr. Brendsel. As I testified, I was CEO of Freddie Mac for
    a long, long period of time. I cannot recall ever being forced
    to make or to purchase a mortgage loan that I didn't feel, as a
    matter of policy at Freddie Mac, was a good mortgage loan, a
    sound mortgage loan, and an attractive mortgage loan for the
    home buyer or the owner of an apartment building.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Raines.
        Mr. Raines. I do not believe that poor people are the cause
    of the current financial crisis, nor do I believe defaults on
    the loans that they might hold is the cause. They have much too
    small a share of the market. Most of the losses, as I read the
    record, have come on mortgages that were made to middle-class
    and upper-middle-class people, not to poor people.
        And I do not believe that community reinvestment loans are
    the cause of the concern, and apparently neither does the
    comptroller of the currency nor the chairman of the Fed, each
    of whom have said that the act requirements had no role in the
    current financial crisis.
        So, I think I agree with you that it is just simply untrue
    to blame the current financial crisis on low-, moderate-income
    people or on the act or on Fannie Mae's affordable housing
    goals.
        Mr. Towns. Let's face it, we do have a mess. What do we do
    now? What do you propose?
        Mr. Syron. I think what we need to do is first be
    cognizant, as some people have said, that if you want to have
    long-term fixed-rate mortgages, which the United States as an
    industrial nation, is pretty unique as having, you need to have
    something like the GSEs. I think it is worth doing a very
    thorough review of how these organizations are structured and
    see what we can learn from this and how we can capture the
    benefits of the long-term fixed-rate mortgage and ameliorate
    some of the concerns that come out of being, for example, a
    mono-line company.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. Sir, my observation would be that there are, kind
    of, three tiers of homeowners out there right now. There is a
    tier of folks who are continuing to make payments, continuing
    to stay in homes. To get ahead of the problem there, things
    that Congress or these companies or the financial industry can
    do is to reduce the rates and reduce the monthly payments.
    Perhaps even using the Tax Code would be helpful in avoiding
    that segment becoming a problem.
        There is a second tier who are folks that are maybe or
    maybe not making their payments, struggling but staying in the
    homes. That group needs not only the reduction in the monthly
    payments but probably some restructuring, such as, say, balloon
    note or reduction in principal.
        Unfortunately, there is also a set of folks who are already
    in the process of default and foreclosure. And my
    recommendation there for society is we do everything we can to
    keep them in those homes--government relief programs,
    charitable relief programs, providing a conversion from
    ownership back into rental. Those types of things are probably
    going to be most successful.
        So, I think you have to attack the problem, because it is a
    little different depending on the type of homeowner you are
    addressing.
        Mr. Brendsel. My response, to answer the question, would be
    I think, first, in agreement with Mr. Mudd, we need to take
    action to reduce the rate of mortgage home foreclosures. And,
    really, what results ultimately from that is that cascading
    effect on home prices and dumping of homes on the real estate
    market. So, I think some careful review of foreclosure
    practices, loan workout practices and so forth, mortgage
    modification practices by all lenders and servicers and owners
    of these mortgage loans is extremely important. Our experience
    at Freddie Mac at a much earlier time was it is really
    important to the stability of the housing market as to how one
    reacts to it in a time of distress and increase in mortgage
    loan defaults.
        Longer term, going forward, I think actions there need to
    look at, first, how to regulate better the origination
    practices in the country. I think they are doing spotty
    regulation over time as to the types of mortgage loans that get
    made, how they get made, the origination practices, and so
    forth.
        Part of that goes to the definition even as to what is a
    subprime mortgage loan, what is covered under HOPE and what is
    not and all that. And I do think that there are parts of this
    market in terms of the origination practices that were really
    very flawed.
        Finally, as I said explicitly in my testimony, I think one
    certainly needs to review, as part of the work of this
    committee and others, the appropriate structure of Freddie Mac
    and Fannie Mae and the regulation of them. I am absolutely
    convinced that preserving a viable fixed-rate mortgage market
    in the United States is critical to this Nation and that
    Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as government-sponsored enterprises
    with this public mission, relying on private capital is
    essential to it.
        Mr. Raines. I agree with much of what has been said, and I
    think there are four steps that--or, really, five steps that
    need to be taken to resolve the overall financial crisis but
    particularly with regard to housing.
        Step No. 1 is we have to provide financing to the system.
    The system is frozen up, piecemeal. The administration and the
    Fed have begun to provide financing, for the good and bad. That
    needs to expand.
        Second, we need to separate the good assets from the bad
    assets and recapitalize financial institutions, such as Freddie
    Mac and Fannie Mae, but also the banks and others. They need to
    recognize that the bad assets are bad assets and separate them,
    so people can look at these institutions without having to
    guess what their real financial condition is. They need to be
    recapitalized because the bad assets--you need to replace that
    capital.
        The third step is to work out the bad assets. To me, I have
    been stunned at the reluctance to actually work out these
    millions of loans because houses, as assets, are depreciating
    assets. An empty house can overnight become worthless as people
    come in and strip out the copper, take out the plumbing, remove
    other things. The only thing you can do with that home is tear
    it down. To me, it is a crime that we are not investing funds
    to keep people in these homes. It is too late to worry about
    moral hazard with regard to these loans.
        The last two things relate to regulation. We need to have
    more extensive regulation of big, leveraged financial entities,
    whether they are called GSEs or banks or insurance companies or
    hedge funds, whatever their name. If they are big enough to
    threaten the economy, there has to be intelligent regulation.
        And the last point, there needs to be regulation to protect
    consumers. There is no way that the average consumer can
    understand the documents that are placed in front of them when
    they get a mortgage. I know I can't, and I have tried. I made
    it through one time, and I got to all but one that I could
    understand. That one, to this day, I don't know what it said.
        And every day we are asking ordinary consumers to
    understand negative amortization, to understand what it means
    for them to have a subprime versus a prime loan, to understand
    a two/30 mortgage. It is impossible for the average person to
    keep up with this. We need to have more rigorous protection of
    consumers in the mortgage market.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        [The prepared statement of Hon. Edolphus Towns follows:]

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        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T0808.046

        Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Towns.
        I would like to request Members, if you have an open-ended
    question, to ask it in the beginning rather than at the end.
        Mr. Mica.
        Mr. Mica. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        We have before us some of the perpetrators of the financial
    meltdown of our country. It is interesting how the committees
    operated. If you want to see where we are going today, read
    today's Washington Post. Commend the staff working diligently
    with the Washington Post to see where they are trying to lead
    the public. The committee tried to lead the public first in its
    Wall Street's fault. Today, we are going to concentrate on 2005
    forward, or 2004 forward. But, you have also heard some of the
    perpetrators, most recently named here, of our financial
    downfall blame it on somebody else. And Mr. Raines, of course
    his hands are clean, and he is telling us how to behave in the
    future.
        Just for the record, let me read from Investor Daily a
    different take on this: ``Fannie and Freddie, the main vehicle
    of Clinton's multicultural housing policy, drove the explosion
    of the subprime housing market by buying up literally billions
    of dollars of substandard loans, funding loans that ordinarily
    wouldn't have been made, based on much time-honored notions as
    putting money down, having sufficient income, and maintaining a
    payment record indicating creditworthiness.''
        With all the old rules out the window, Fannie and Freddie
    gobbled up the market. Using extraordinary leverage, they
    eventually controlled 90 percent of the secondary market
    mortgages. Their total portfolios top $5.4 trillion, half of
    all U.S. mortgage lending.
        They told you that they were following Wall Street. Mr.
    Raines mentioned, just in his little commentary to us, that we
    had to have good underwriting standards. Actually, if we go
    back and look at some of the underwriting standards, they start
    deteriorating under the Clinton administration. But, we don't
    want to talk about that today.
        Mr. Raines, you were there when Mr. Cuomo decided to lower
    the reserve from 10 percent to $2.5 billion. That was a little
    bit of lowering some of the standard. And then you came and
    testified before Congress that the reserves were adequate
    before you left.
        Mr. Raines went on to say in 1999--let me read this quote
    from September 30, 1999. ``Fannie Mae has expanded
    homeownership for millions of families by the 1990's by
    reducing down payment requirements. `I guess that wouldn't be
    lowering standards,' said Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's
    chairman and chief executive officer.'' And continue to quote,
    `` `Yet, there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a
    notch below what our underwriting has required who have been
    relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates than
    the so-called subprime market.' ''
        Mr. Raines was indeed part of the problem. Mr. Raines was
    also found that, under his watch, the Office of Federal Housing
    Enterprise Oversight, regulating the body of Fannie Mae, found
    that Mr. Raines, under his directorship, he received $50
    million in overstated--and he overstated earnings by some $50
    million--is estimated to gain huge bonuses.
        Mr. Raines, I have some of your compensation here. Could
    you tell the committee how much compensation that you received
    from 1998 through the time you left? Bonuses, compensation,
    benefits.
        Mr. Raines. I don't have that.
        Mr. Mica. Would you say it is $90 million?
        Mr. Raines. OFHEO has estimated the number as $90 million.
        Mr. Mica. And when you found that, under your leadership,
    that some of these factors had been fudged--well, first of all,
    the two fellows over here--Mr. Syron, you just left in
    September.
        Well, let's go back to Raines. We said that, 2004, you are
    still getting bonuses. In 2008, so far, you have gotten
    $2,085,000--that is just year to date--in payments from Fannie
    Mae. Is that correct?
        Mr. Raines. That is what I am given. The number I think you
    are referring to is a result of the settlement I had with
    OFHEO.
        Mr. Mica. It was a neat settlement, too, because you agreed
    to donate some of your stock rather than take the proceeds from
    the stock. Was that part of the settlement?
        Mr. Raines. That is part of the settlement.
        Mr. Mica. That was pretty clever, because you had about a
    1\1/2\ in stocks. But, if we get your tax returns, you donated
    that and then took an exemption for that. Is that correct?
        Mr. Raines. I didn't file tax returns for 2008. No.
        Mr. Mica. I am talking about your settlement with--I need
    an additional minute.
        Mr. Issa. I will give the gentleman a minute.
        Mr. Mica. So, again, I know what you did. The settlement,
    you really didn't pay anything. You probably took a tax
    deduction to deduct the amount that you said you were donating,
    and then the insurance company actually paid the fine. Fannie
    Mae's insurance paid the fine that was levied on you. Is that
    correct?
        Mr. Raines. There was no fine.
        Mr. Mica. There was $3 million that was paid by the
    insurance. We can call it whatever you'd like.
        The last thing--I don't have a lot of time here--is this is
    the bill Mr. Shays introduced in 1992 to further regulate some
    of the practices that were going on at Fannie Mae. And I know
    you helped to kill this. I was one of Mr. Shays's cosponsors.
    $175 million was spent in lobbying from 1998, a good portion of
    that under Mr. Raines' reign.
        Is that correct?
        Mr. Raines. I am not familiar with that number, no, sir.
        Mr. Mica. But, you are familiar with the lobbying
    information that you had from 1998 until you left in 2004.
        Mr. Raines. Fannie Mae did have lobbyists, yes, sir.
        Mr. Mica. And if I find some documents that showed you
    tried to influence killing legislation that would have
    regulated Fannie Mae, but that documentation doesn't exist?
        Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Mica. I want him to answer that last question.
        Chairman Waxman. There is a pending question, and the
    gentleman will be given an opportunity to answer it.
        Mr. Raines. I have no idea what documentation you have.
    Fannie Mae, like any other corporation owned by shareholders,
    came to Congress and expressed its views. And we have done that
    consistently in another committee where I've had the
    opportunity to testify many times, and that is a matter of
    public record.
        Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Kanjorski.
        Mr. Kanjorski. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Maybe I should make an observation that I thought the
    purpose of this hearing would be to uncover the potential
    causes of the real estate disaster in the country, but it seems
    we are going over testimony that I have heard in another life
    before the Financial Services Committee.
        And I suggest, if the members of this committee want to get
    a good history, go back and read the volumes and volumes of
    testimony from 2000 on until 2005, while the Financial Services
    Committee and the Congress of the United States were under the
    control of the Republican majority. And the piece of
    legislation that Mr. Mica refers to was introduced by a
    Republican while he was in the majority of the Congress and
    under a Republican President. It failed to move through. But I
    am not going to make those points about gaming the politics,
    because it is really unimportant.
        The question is, and I think Mr. Towns put his hand on it:
    Are there any observations that you can make to help us out as
    to how we can stop?
        And I think my first question would be, as I understand it,
    Fannie and Freddie would be in trouble today even if they had
    not been involved in subprime lending purposes. Is that
    correct? Assuming that you never had packaged a subprime
    situation and the real estate devaluation in this country fell
    by approximately 30 percent, as it has. Under the formula that
    we had studied on the Financial Services Committee for 5 years,
    it was indicated to be the perfect worst storm.
        I think, Mr. Raines, you recall when Mr. Baker was holding
    those hearings. And we were all saying, what would happen if we
    had a perfect terrible storm? And if I recall, I think your
    testimony was: If the real estate deflation in this country
    amounted to more than 25 percent, all real estate and all of
    the GSEs would be in trouble. And, lo and behold, that is
    exactly what has happened.
        So I re-pose the question: If there had never been subprime
    mortgages in the portfolio of Fannie and Freddie, would it
    still have difficulty because of the precipitous fall of the
    valuation of the real estate market of this country,
    particularly where you are so heavily involved, in California,
    Florida, Nevada, and States that have really suffered that
    devaluation?
        Mr. Mudd. As an analogy, if you are in the business of
    insuring against hurricanes, and hurricanes hit a third of the
    country, you are going to suffer. If you are in the business--
    solely the business of financing U.S. housing, and the U.S.
    housing market goes down by 30 percent, you are going to
    suffer, yes, sir.
        Mr. Kanjorski. We all knew that, didn't we? That was
    brought out in testimony 4 or 5 years ago. Is that correct?
        Mr. Mudd. It was modeled and discussed and disclosed.
        Mr. Raines. I completely agree with your characterization
    that it was well-known that a significant decline in housing
    prices would have a dramatic effect, not just on GSEs, but on
    the entire financial system. The housing finance market is so
    big that you cannot have a major impact there without affecting
    the entire economy. So, I think your characterization is
    exactly right.
        Mr. Kanjorski. We are thrusting around right now to find
    some underpinning to real estate valuation, stop the deflation
    in the real estate market, and to sustain people in houses, as
    you have all discussed, to prevent foreclosure. Hold the market
    and hold the house occupied, so that it doesn't depreciate in
    value.
        Has either of you gentlemen participated in an analysis to
    see whether or not we could create a subsidiary corporation, a
    sponsored enterprise of the Federal Government, to aid or
    subsidize mortgages that are going underwater or going into
    foreclosure, to hold people in their homes, and what the
    relevant cost would be of doing that?
        And would the value of rescue to the economy warrant taking
    that unusual action in the million or million-and-a-half
    mortgages that probably could be held in residence or
    foreclosure tenants in residence?
        Mr. Raines. I have done a little analysis of that, but
    without the benefit of a lot of staff resources. But, it is my
    view, and I think it is the view of a number of consumer-
    oriented groups, that amounts as small as $10,000 to $20,000
    can go a long way to salvaging a lot of mortgages. In many
    cases, lenders and the homeowners are not that far apart in
    their ability to modify a loan and go forward.
        And so, in my view, providing that kind of money at the
    table where there are negotiations going on to modify mortgages
    would have a substantial impact. And you can do that without
    having to go and buy up all the mortgages in the country. You
    can simply provide the additional funds to bridge the gap on a
    modification. I believe that would have a significant positive
    net present value for the taxpayer, as well as for the
    homeowner and the lender.
        Mr. Kanjorski. How would we get that analysis done quickly,
    and by whom?
        Mr. Raines. I think the best resources available to the
    Congress on understanding the housing market exists within
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And I believe that, through their
    contacts with their services, they can give you a pretty quick
    assessment of what level of funding would need to be available
    to greatly increase the rate of working out mortgages.
        Mr. Kanjorski. Could we take that action even though the
    real estate market has not ceased to deflate? In other words,
    could we do it at any point and plug in, or do we have to wait
    until we hit the bottom of the real estate market to start
    working the rescue?
        Mr. Raines. I think you can start now and work with those
    loans that are available to be modified. Certainly there are
    some where we will find that the market has gone down further.
    But, trying to wait until the market hits bottom I think will
    only make the bottom deeper.
        And, therefore, I think starting now and ramping up over
    time is the right way to do it. You can't charm the market back
    into having confidence, but if you start working out loans one
    by one, people will begin to have confidence.
        [The prepared statement of Hon. Paul E. Kanjorski follows:]

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T0808.047

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T0808.048

        Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Kanjorski. Your time has
    expired.
        Mr. Burton.
        Mr. Burton. Have you ever heard a term, ``Friend of
    Angelo'' program?
        Mr. Raines. I have heard of that term in the newspapers.
        Mr. Burton. Have you ever had a home loan from Countrywide?
        Mr. Raines. Yes.
        Mr. Burton. Was this given to you through the term,
    ``Friend of Angelo?''
        Mr. Raines. No.
        Mr. Burton. So, you didn't get any preferential treatment?
        Mr. Raines. No, I did not, in terms of the terms of my
    mortgage.
        Mr. Burton. So, you paid the same rate and same conditions
    as anybody else would under the same conditions?
        Mr. Raines. If they have the same credit profile, the same
    loan to value as I had, yes, sir.
        Mr. Burton. So, if we checked on that loan that you got
    from Countrywide, we wouldn't find anything different from
    anybody that borrowed from Countrywide in the whole country?
    You would not get preferential treatment?
        Mr. Raines. I am unaware of any preferential treatment.
        Mr. Burton. Would it be possible to get copies of the
    mortgage papers that you had made with Countrywide?
        Mr. Raines. I am sure that Countrywide has copies.
        Mr. Burton. Do you have copies?
        Mr. Raines. I no longer own that property.
        Mr. Burton. I am sure you kept those documents--I keep mine
    for a long, long time--if you had a mortgage on a home. Could
    you provide those to the committee for the record?
        Mr. Raines. If I can find them, I will be happy to.
        Mr. Burton. Thank you very much.
        Did you or anyone at your direction discuss with Angelo
    Mozilo--I guess that is how you pronounce his name--or his
    subordinates who might be candidates for this kind of
    preferential program? Did you ever talk to him about this
    special treatment for any government officials?
        Mr. Raines. No.
        Mr. Burton. You never did?
        Mr. Raines. Never.
        Mr. Burton. You are sure?
        Mr. Raines. Yes.
        Mr. Burton. None of the U.S. Senators or Congressmen or
    anybody in the government, that you know of, you never
    discussed their loans with Mr. Mozilo?
        Mr. Raines. No, I never did that.
        Mr. Burton. OK.
        Mr. Raines and Mr. Mudd, we have a September 2004 memo that
    discusses a 16-month outlook for Fannie Mae from Mr. Marzol,
    chief credit officer and later for financing credit. The memo
    was written to Mr. Mudd and was developed at Frank's request. I
    presume that was you, Mr. Raines. And Mr. Marzol writes that
    ``the trend of rising home prices nationally will continue
    until near term, but the downside risk will be greater due to
    declining affordability and signs of frothiness.''
        This sounds like a clear warning as early as 2004 from him
    that a housing bubble is likely to occur. Yet, it was precisely
    in 2004 when Fannie Mae started increasing its purchases of
    risky subprime and Alt-A mortgages dramatically.
        And I can't understand, why would anyone enter into a risky
    market like the subprime business when he knew there was a
    possible bust in the housing bubble? Can you explain that to
    me? I mean, he sent this memo to you, and yet, you increased
    the risky mortgages and subprime Alt-A mortgages that you were
    supporting.
        Mr. Raines. If you are talking about 2004, when I was
    there, I can respond to that, which is, in fact----
        Mr. Burton. Mr. Mudd can respond subsequent to that.
        Mr. Raines. In 2004, Fannie Mae, in fact, lost a dramatic
    share of the market because it did not participate in these
    markets. And where we did buy subprime loans, we also sought to
    get insurance for covering those loans from mortgage insurance
    companies, where they would absorb the risk of these mortgages.
        So, we were very cautious about any entry into that market
    and how we did it. And I think it has been proven by the
    performance of those loans. They performed better than the
    loans in the market as a whole.
        Mr. Burton. According to Mr. Marzol, in 2004, he said there
    was a real problem, that a housing bubble was likely to occur.
    And according to the information we have, Fannie Mae increased
    its purchases of risky subprime and Alt-A mortgages
    dramatically after that.
        Mr. Mudd, you were in charge after that. Do you want to
    respond?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes. From 2004 to 2005, the purchases of subprime
    securities actually went down from $34.5 billion to $16.3
    billion and then went up again in 2006, largely as a reflection
    of what was being----
        Mr. Burton. But, was there a redefinition of subprime
    through your underwriting mechanisms? Your underwriting
    standards went down. So, if your underwriting standard went
    down, then a mortgage that was considered a risk would no
    longer be considered a risk because you lowered your
    underwriting standards. Did that take place during that
    timeframe? Did you change your standards at that time?
        Mr. Mudd. The underwriting standards change constantly in
    response to a market.
        Mr. Burton. During the time when you were in charge, did
    the underwriting change dramatically so that the subprime risk
    went up?
        Mr. Mudd. We did our best at the time to balance out both
    sides of the equation with respect to risk. The day you open--
    --
        Mr. Burton. You were the ultimate person who made the
    decision on underwriting changes, were you not?
        Mr. Mudd. Chief executive officer, so I am responsible,
    yes. And am I making----
        Mr. Burton. Were you, with change like that, when they
    changed the underwriting requirements----
        Mr. Mudd. I think it is important, Congressman, to
    understand there are two sides to the underwriting equation.
    One is the risk side, and the other is the pricing side. So,
    one has to look both at what is incremental risk, and second,
    are you pricing for it, and are you getting appropriately
    compensated for that risk?
        Based on everything we knew at the time, we did the best
    that we could to ensure that we were pricing for the risk that
    we were putting on the book, because the market had moved in a
    direction because of the affordability problem Mr. Marzol
    referred to.
        Chairman Waxman. Your time has expired.
        Mr. Burton. How about Mr. Kanjorski?
        Chairman Waxman. He didn't have extra time.
        Mr. Burton. I saw the light.
        Chairman Waxman. You've forgotten what it is like to be at
    the end of the line waiting for your turn.
        Now I am going to recognize Mrs. Maloney. But, before I do,
    I would like to ask unanimous consent that the documents from
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac productions, identified by the
    majority and minority as relevant to today's hearing, will be
    included in the record. Without objection, that will be the
    order.
        You are recognized for 5 minutes.
        Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        You have been a spectacular chairman. It has been an honor
    to serve on this committee. And in your new position on the
    Commerce Committee, you will be trying, confronting, really,
    some of the most pressing issues we have: universal health
    care, health care for the 9/11 workers, global warming, energy
    independence. And my constituents wish you well, particularly
    those without health care. And I hope this committee can play a
    supportive role in the many challenges you confront.
        My constituents are very angry about these bailouts, and
    they want to know why a $100 billion line of credit was given
    to Freddie and Fannie, and that Freddie has drawn down $15
    billion of that $100 billion line of credit. We are looking at
    what happened. They want to understand what happened.
        So, in preparing, we interviewed your former chief risk
    officer, Mr. David Andrukonis, from 2003 to 2005. He said he
    held that position and reported directly to you. He told us
    that, during these years, mortgage lenders were making
    increasing demands for Alt-A loans, loans that had no
    documentation. He found them risky. I know that in New York,
    many people said it was easier to get a loan with no
    documentation than to pay your rent during those days. And he
    said, ``Wall Street became, I think, pretty adept at packaging
    securities of loans that we would have considered to be higher-
    risk; that is, reduced or very little documentation.''
        According to him, big mortgage lenders like Countrywide and
    Lehman, put a lot of pressure on Freddie Mac to buy these
    risky, no-doc, Alt-A loans. And he said these lenders were
    constantly looking to reduce documentation because it was
    easier to produce these loans and sell them, get fees. And the
    toxic loans are now what we are confronting.
        He said that he reached out to you. He said that he was
    opposed to these no-documentation loans, that he talked to you
    directly, that he sent you memo after memo outlining to you and
    the Board and others that this was risky and not the right way
    to go.
        And I would like to put these memos in the record, along
    with the interview that was conducted with him and our staff.
        Chairman Waxman. Without objection.
        Mrs. Maloney. And so, is it true that your chief risk
    officer advised you not to buy these reduced-documentation,
    Alt-A, no-doc loans?
        Mr. Syron. Well, first of all, I don't believe I have seen
    those memos that were addressed to me, but I am not sure.
        Mrs. Maloney. We will be glad to give them to you. Did he
    advise you not to buy those loans? And did he advise you that
    they might be risky?
        Mr. Syron. Yes, ma'am. But if you look----
        Mrs. Maloney. I only have 4 minutes.
        Furthermore, I would like to say that he was right,
    because, under your leadership, Freddie Mac bought more than
    $150 billion of no-doc, Alt-A loans. And, according to your
    most recent SEC report, your company's Alt-A purchases have
    resulted in more than $8 billion this year in credit losses due
    to these risky products that your chief risk officer said do
    not buy.
        Now, what happened to Mr. David Andrukonis? He was fired.
    He was fired. He felt that you agreed with him but that you
    still continued to buy what everyone was saying was high-risk.
    It is common sense: If you give a loan to someone and they
    don't even have to show you that they have a job, you are in
    trouble.
        So, my question to you now, and my basic question to you in
    light of all of the money that Freddie has lost and that
    taxpayer money that has been supporting you--and you have spent
    $15 billion of it--given the fact that you lost so much money
    on these Alt-A risky loans, wouldn't it have been better not to
    fire your risk manager, but to fire your portfolio manager of
    your Alt-A loans?
        Do you regret firing your risk manager who told you that
    you were moving in the wrong direction, that it was risky and
    toxic and not what you should be doing? Do you regret firing
    him? Do you regret buying these risky loans? Do you regret the
    way you led and, I would say, mismanaged your company?
        Mr. Syron. Well, ma'am, if you go back and look at the
    records in Freddie Mac in--I think you said 2000, but it is
    about right----
        Mrs. Maloney. 2003 to 2005.
        Mr. Syron. I am not sure of the exact time. But, there was
    a long, long debate with people on both sides of what should be
    done with Alt-A. This was done, and the debate was in the
    context of an environment in which Freddie Mac's market share
    was declining and the question of our relevance and ability to
    influence markets----
        Mrs. Maloney. But, sir, with all due respect----
        Chairman Waxman. Your question is pending, and the
    gentleman should answer, but then we have to move on. The time
    has expired.
        The question is, do you regret the decision to fire the
    risk manager and not to fire the portfolio manager?
        Mrs. Maloney. And to buy the Alt-A loans that were risky
    and put the taxpayers' money at risk.
        Mr. Syron. First of all, Mr. Andrukonis was fired for a
    variety of reasons, and it was not primarily for his having a
    view on credit.
        Second--I am trying to remember the different parts of the
    question. Second, in perfect hindsight, I think you always wish
    that any loan that went bad that we hadn't bought. But, given
    the information that we had at the time and given the balance
    that we were trying to achieve, we thought we made the right
    decision at the time.
        Chairman Waxman. The gentlelady's time has expired.
        Mr. Westmoreland.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I am going to ask each one of you this question.
        Mr. Syron, what was your salary from 2003 to 2008, your
    total salary? And do you get any pension?
        Mr. Syron. My total salary over that period of time was
    about $4 million a year. And I have pension rights that I am
    not quite sure, but I think, after tax, are worth in the
    neighborhood of a little less than $2 million.
        Mr. Westmoreland. About how much?
        Mr. Syron. I think a little less than $2 million.
        Mr. Westmoreland. $2 million a year?
        Mr. Syron. No, no. The present value actuarial, depending
    on how long I live.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Mr. Mudd, the same question to you. From
    2005 to 2008, your total compensation?
        Mr. Mudd. I have a different number, so if I can make an
    estimate to meet your request, it would be in the vicinity of
    probably $7 million or $8 million of compensation. That
    wouldn't be counting any stock, which obviously grants value,
    and very little value now.
        Mr. Westmoreland. But, total, you are going to stay with $7
    million or $8 million?
        Mr. Mudd. I have numbers for 2004 to 2008. I would be happy
    to supply those later.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Are you eligible for a pension?
        Mr. Mudd. I believe so, yes.
        Mr. Westmoreland. And what would that pension be?
        Mr. Mudd. I can't be precise. I would have to research it.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Did this pension come from just your 3
    years of service?
        Mr. Mudd. No. I had been with the company going back to
    2000. So, I would assume that it would have been throughout
    that period.
        Mr. Westmoreland. And you are going to get a pension of
    somewhere----
        Mr. Mudd. If I can get you a precise number?
        Mr. Westmoreland. All right.
        Mr. Brendsel, how about you?
        Mr. Brendsel. Yes. Of course, I left the company in June
    2000. So, what years are you----
        Mr. Westmoreland. From 1987 to 2003.
        Mr. Brendsel. That is a matter, certainly, of public
    disclosure.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Can you give me a hint?
        Mr. Brendsel. I would have to say that, in the last few
    years, the amount disclosed, reflecting stock grants and
    everything, based on the valuations used, about $10 million a
    year. Of that------
        Mr. Westmoreland. About $10 million a year?
        Mr. Brendsel. Yes, including the stock grants. The salary
    was about $1 million in 2002 and 2003.
        Mr. Westmoreland. They got you cheap.
        How about the pension?
        Mr. Brendsel. I am eligible for a pension, and I am
    receiving a pension.
        Mr. Westmoreland. And how much is that?
        Mr. Brendsel. It's reflecting my 21 years of service; it is
    about $400,000 a year.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Now, Mr. Raines, I know it has been said
    that $90 million, and I notice in your testimony you got some
    explanation of that, that it really wasn't $90 million, but
    what was your total package for the time that you were there?
        Mr. Raines. I don't know off the top of my head. The number
    I referred to was a number that OFHEO has included in their
    documents.
        Mr. Westmoreland. Well, you had $90 million in there, and
    then you said there was some discrepancy in that and because--
    --
        Mr. Raines. Not a discrepancy. Accepting the OFHEO number
    as the beginning point, 40 percent of that has effectively been
    clawed back as a result of my settlement with OFHEO and the
    stock options that I was awarded becoming worthless. So, 40
    percent of the $90, if you accept the $90 as the number, has
    been clawed back by one means or another.
        Mr. Westmoreland. That is still good money though, you
    know, it's still good money.
        Mr. Raines. Excellent money.
        Mr. Westmoreland. What kind of pension do you get, sir?
        Mr. Raines. I am qualified for a pension based on my 11
    years at Fannie Mae.
        Mr. Westmoreland. And what would that be?
        I know you got $3 million in 1 year, $400,000 1 year.
        Mr. Raines. My pension is approximately $1.2 million.
        Mr. Westmoreland. $1.2 million for the 11 years of service.
    That is not good, I mean that is good. That is good money. And
    let me say this, you know, I'm glad that I came to the hearing
    today to learn that none of you all had anything to with Fannie
    Mae or Freddie Mac going south, that you all were getting paid
    millions of dollars a year, millions of dollars a year, but you
    didn't know anything was wrong. You didn't have any idea that
    it was going south, and none of you seem to have done anything
    about it. I haven't heard one person say today that you
    recognized that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac was in trouble and
    that you did something about it. So, it's quite extraordinary,
    and I think the American people and the taxpayers are going to
    be kind of miffed that you all's job was basically as CEOs of
    these companies was rearranging the deck furniture on the
    Titanic as it went down and didn't know it was going down. That
    is amazing.
        Chairman Waxman. Gentleman's time has expired. If the
    witness, I don't know if it's a pending question or not, but
    let's----
        Mr. Brendsel. Mr. Chairman, I want to respond to that last
    comment.
        When I left Freddie Mac in June 2003, Freddie Mac was safe
    and sound and well-capitalized and had a high quality mortgage
    portfolio.
        Chairman Waxman. Thank you. Now, we go to Mr. Cummings.
        Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
    gentlemen, thank you for being here. I can tell you as I sit
    here I, you know, am just disturbed, and that is putting it
    lightly, because when I look at this fiasco, I think both of
    these companies did have something to do with it. And I'm not
    going to sit here and act like they didn't. I think Tom
    Friedman in his article dated November 25th, in the New York
    Times, put it right. He said so many people were in on it.
    People who had no business buying a home with nothing down and
    nothing to pay for 2 years. People who had no business pushing
    such mortgages but made fortunes doing so. People who had no
    business bundling those loans into securities and selling them
    to third parties as if they were AAA bonds but made fortunes
    doing so. People who had no business rating those loans as AAA
    but made fortunes doing so, and people who had no business
    buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so
    they could earn a little better yield but had no--but made
    fortunes doing so. And you know, the thing that gets me is that
    I have constituents who, and I think Mr. Towns alluded to this,
    folks have tried to blame poor people and minorities, but a lot
    of those people, and I admire you for what you said, Mr.
    Raines, you talked about the dreams of folk and trying to help
    them get a home and how important it is, but what has happened
    as a result of all of these folks, including some of you guys,
    what has happened is that the people in my district have been
    left with two things, holding a bag. They have lost their
    houses, and they have zero in one bag and debt in the other.
    That is what they have.
        And so, I want to go to you, Mr. Syron, because you have
    said some very interesting things that I would just like to
    hear a little bit more about. You know you talked about these
    no income, no asset loans. They call them NINA loans, is that
    correct?
        Mr. Syron. Yes, sir.
        Mr. Cummings. Keep your voice up. We want to hear clearly
    what you're saying. Banks use no income, no asset mortgages to
    lend money to a borrower, without requiring any information
    about the person's income or assets. This was an increasingly
    popular type of Alt-A loan in 2004, 2005, 2006, and Freddie Mac
    purchased a lot of them. Let me ask a common sense question.
    Why would anyone give a mortgage without requiring information
    on a borrower's income or assets? Help me with that.
        Mr. Syron. Well, sir, if you have information on their FICO
    score, right, and they have a strong FICO score and you have
    information on the loan-to-value ratio of the property and in
    many of these cases, you would see that the risk for the loan
    shouldn't be that great. These loans were developed in the
    first place for what you might call borrowers that had special
    characteristics; i.e., uneven income flows, actors,
    waitresses----
        Mr. Cummings. Well, obviously you're not familiar with Mr.
    Raines' testimony because what I read in his written testimony,
    he said part of the problem was when we got into these
    subprimes. Before they were based on people who had equity, and
    then when they didn't and when we moved to these kinds of
    loans, they were more based on score, so, we got rid of the
    equity, a lot of times the equity that we really needed to
    secure these loans, I mean to truly secure them, and we went to
    this other form of basically what you're about to tell me now.
        But, so, can you tell me why one of your top executives
    wrote in a memo to you on October 6, 2004, that Freddie should
    continue buying NINA loans because in his words, ``it provides
    unique market growth opportunities to Freddie Mac.''
        Mr. Syron. Sir, I don't have the memo before me, but I will
    try to answer on the basis----
        Mr. Cummings. Briefly because they only gave me 5 minutes.
        Mr. Syron. I think what had happened is the market had
    migrated away from the traditional kinds of products that
    Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had provided, and I think what he
    was--I'm speculating.
        Mr. Cummings. Let me speculate. Let me tell you what I
    speculate. I speculate it was about profit, I speculate that it
    was about greed because a top Freddie credit official, Ray
    Romano, explained the rationale for doing so in June 4, 2007,
    in a memo to the Freddie Mac board where he warned about the,
    ``increased reputation, fraud, predatory lending and credit
    risk posed by our current program.'' How about that? Let's see
    you speculate.
        Mr. Syron. Sir, we're an organization that had to develop
    balance, and we had to balance between the needs of safety and
    soundness, the needs of our mission, and the needs also to be
    relevant from the perspective of our shareholders because we
    were like any other privately held company, and I checked a
    number of times, and we had no ability to treat our
    shareholders differently than anyone else did.
        Mr. Cummings. I see my time is up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Cummings.
        Mr. Souder.
        Mr. Souder. Thank you I want to followup just a little bit
    on a similar line that my friend, Mr. Cummings, just had. One
    of the extraordinary things about this series of hearings,
    whether it was the bond people or the AIG people or the hedge
    fund people, nobody takes responsibility for anything. Nobody
    comes up and says, I'm sorry, I may have made some judgments, I
    did the best I could. It's like, no, it wasn't us. And it gets
    very frustrating to figure out what to do next if nobody is
    responsible for anything.
        I was really intrigued with the statement of with 20/20
    hindsight, it would be reasonable to say that people who didn't
    have credible income to meet their payments, who were depending
    on house values going up to meet it, or who lied, would have
    been higher in defaulting. You know, I would say with 20/20
    hindsight; in fact, I would say the average American could
    figure that out with foresight, and they don't need to get paid
    $7 million a year to figure that out with foresight, that your
    model was not working.
        Now, what is disturbing to me is that you said, Mr. Mudd,
    that you weren't sure whether it was systemic or cyclical so
    that you plunged into it, separating now subprime and the Alt-A
    types of things, but then in addition to that, I think Mr.
    Syron said in his testimony and, Mr. Mudd, you said similar,
    that your organizations were there to make the market work, in
    order to provide somebody who supported affordable housing, Mr.
    Raines' statement really interested me because this isn't just
    about low-income housing, this is about what happened to the
    housing market as a whole, and if what you said--can I ask you
    a followup question to that? You said it wasn't just low
    income, it was higher. Are you saying that for Fannie and
    Freddie, your problems aren't just low income, that Fannie and
    Freddie was also going far beyond affordable housing in giving
    risky loans?
        Mr. Raines. What I was saying is that Fannie Mae provided
    service to low, moderate and middle-income Americans, and I was
    saying in answer to the question, that low-income Americans
    have not contributed disproportionately to the problems at
    Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
        Mr. Souder. Reclaiming my time, I just wanted to make that
    clear that it wasn't just the lowest housing portion here, that
    Fannie and Freddie were risking dollars as they moved up the
    scale because, in fact, there appears to have been as much of a
    profit motive as there was just to get people into homes. And
    that is important as we develop the--where we go next. And the
    challenge here is that since I understand Mr. Syron's
    testimony, he says, I want to make sure, yes, that you do this
    enabling banks to make new loans; in other words, part of the
    purpose of these agencies was to expand and enable. So, when
    you went into this market, you pretended like you came in late,
    reluctantly, you were worried whether your business model,
    whether it was systemic or cyclical, but in fact you're the
    enabler's agency, in fact your two agencies enabled this market
    and gave it a security that it didn't otherwise have or it
    might have flattened out.
        In fact, they can put this up, Mr. Syron, March 30, 2004,
    e-mail from one of your executives. The author describes
    loosening of Freddie Mac's underwriting standards in order to
    accommodate risky mortgages that do not require verifying the
    borrower's income or assets, which is extraordinary. He goes on
    to write, these are largely driven by a need to allow lenders
    to compete with Countrywide's Fast and Easy program and Bank of
    America's Paper Saver programs. I view these programs as
    fundamentally changing the underwriting process for as much as
    30-plus percent of the mortgage loans we purchase.
        Now, the question here is, is what were Fannie and Freddie
    trying to compete with Countrywide's Fast and Easy programs
    for? You're supposed to be the more--you're supposed to not be
    the enabler of risky programs. What was your check? Mr. Syron,
    do you want to----
        Mr. Syron. Sir, I would debate whether we were, that this
    market wouldn't have developed even if we weren't involved in
    it. I mean what we saw in the subprime market is the subprime
    market developed around that, and so did the Alt-A market.
        Mr. Souder. Let me ask a followup to that. Do you believe
    that if Fannie and Freddie would not have gotten involved in
    this market, that the market would have flattened? In other
    words, I'm not saying it wouldn't have started, but would it
    have flattened, or in fact, did your involvement accelerate the
    market, give a glint of Federal, because people don't know
    whether you're private, public, or whatever, approval to that
    market in a different way, and in fact, the taxpayers have
    wound up now holding your share, and in fact, then wound up
    with a bigger problem than we would have had?
        Mr. Syron. Sir, in all due respect, I think we would be
    speculating on my part whether the market would be flattened or
    not because other markets that we were not in expanded and
    expanded quite rapidly.
        Mr. Souder. So, you don't believe you had any basic
    responsibility for the crisis; that is your testimony? That you
    believed it was OK, you went and competed with Countrywide and
    put Fannie and Freddie at risk and gave the patina of cover for
    this for a profit motive?
        Mr. Syron. Sir, I can honestly say I am not saying we made
    decisions perfectly. We certainly didn't, as you pointed out.
    But, I can honestly say that in what we were trying to do at
    the time, we were trying to balance the interests of our
    mission, regulatory objectives, and our obligation to
    shareholders.
        Mr. Souder. By taking in 20/20 loans that did not use
    reasonable standards, didn't have income verification and
    depended on----
        Mr. Towns [presiding]. Thank you very much. Gentleman from
    Ohio, Mr. Kucinich.
        Mr. Kucinich. I thank the gentleman. I'm listening to my
    colleague, Mr. Westmoreland, and I want to pick up on something
    that he said. You know we've got some of the Representatives
    here who act like you just didn't know, that it's almost like
    hearing the response ``I don't know nuttin,'' no
    responsibility, no accountability, stuff just happens, it's the
    housing market, it's the economy, it's the poor people wanting
    homes. But, the facts show, gentlemen, that many of you at this
    table did know the risks and that you were warned not to take
    them, and that you ignored your internal adviser, your Chief
    Risk Officer.
        Now, Mr. Mudd, the committee has been provided with an e-
    mail that your Chief Risk Officer sent to your CEO and copied
    you. You're dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars, and
    this memo from your Chief Risk Officer said the company has one
    of the weakest control processes I have ever witnessed in my
    career. He said the company really doesn't get it, it's
    scraping on controls.
        Now, it appears from the record that as CEO, you were
    taking hundreds of billions of more risk, you were warned by
    your Chief Credit Officer not to do that, you're taking higher
    risks anyway, and then you cut the budget of your Chief Risk
    Officer by 16 percent, you took on more risk while cutting
    internal controls, and at the same time, you're telling your
    board you had all the research necessary to properly assess
    risk. Now, you received an e-mail from your Chief Credit Risk
    Officer, Enrico Delvecchio, that said, I'm very upset, I had to
    stand at a board meeting and hear we have the will and money to
    support taking more credit risk.
        Now, Mr. Mudd, you testified that your investment strategy
    is to keep up with the market. Did you change, did you have a
    change in strategy that involved reducing the resources of your
    credit risk office, which assessed the inherent dangers of your
    investment strategy while at the same time you're taking more
    external risk? Was that part of your strategy to reduce that
    credit risk office?
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Mr. Kucinich. Then why was there a budget cut occurring
    while you're involved in these great risks with billions of
    dollars?
        Mr. Mudd. Congressman, I think the best response is to read
    my----
        Mr. Kucinich. The best response is the truth. Now, did
    someone tell you to cut credit risk, to cut the credit risk
    office budget, or did you make that decision?
        Mr. Mudd. Let me read you what I wrote back to him.
        Mr. Kucinich. Can you answer the question? Who told you to
    cut the budget? Who told you to cut it? You're dealing with
    hundreds of billions of dollars. Can you answer the question?
    Who made the decision to cut the credit risk office's resources
    at the time that you're taking increased risk?
        Mr. Mudd. The cuts in the budget that applied across the
    company were driven by the financial need to drive higher
    capital in the company and to maintain our regulatory capital
    standards. We started with the process----
        Mr. Kucinich. Holy smokes. Is anybody listening to this? He
    is cutting the one person that is telling him, hey, wait,
    you're going to go over a cliff cutting that, and he said we
    have to cut across the board.
        Now, your Credit Risk Officer told you in a memo that far
    from--he said that you are operating far from current market
    practices. He said, ``we are not even close to having proper
    control processes for credit, market, and operational risk.''
    And then he went on to say, ``I get a 16 percent budget cut,''
    and he suggested that there was malice involved.
        Now, what I want to find out, was this calculated? You know
    this is one of the concerns that we have. This isn't a case of
    a cop walking off a beat. This is a case of a cop being told
    don't go there by not giving him enough resources.
        Why did you do that? Explain this to the American people.
    Why did you make a decision to cut your----
        Mr. Mudd. I will explain it to you by reading to you a
    response to him, which was part of a conversation,
    Representative. It is not fair to take an e-mail that is in a
    train of e-mails that has a response right behind it that says
    if you feel the process is not working you know my door,
    telephone, and house are open to you. I'm not aware that you
    sought to do so on this topic. And if, of course, you may say
    that anything you believe to be true at any time to anyone on
    the board or anywhere else, this is my response to him, and I
    believe it is inaccurate for you to suggest anyone expressed a
    view there are enough resources for everyone to do everything
    necessary for the plan. Resources are tight. Everyone has cuts.
    Come and see me----
        Mr. Kucinich. Did you take responsibility for the risk----
        Mr. Mudd. That is what we did. That was the process----
        Mr. Kucinich. Do you take responsibility for the risk----
        Mr. Mudd. We sat down and did that----
        Mr. Kucinich. Your company took--when you ignored the
    advice of your Credit Risk Officer and when you cut the budget,
    do you take that responsibility?
        Mr. Mudd. I followed the process to listen to all of my
    staff, not just the Chief Risk Officer.
        Mr. Kucinich. What did you do though? What did you do? Did
    you cut the budget of your Credit Risk Officer?
        Mr. Mudd. Just like all budgets involving business, we
    negotiated the right number for the people we----
        Mr. Kucinich. Is the answer yes or no? Did you cut your
    Credit Risk Officer's budget?
        Mr. Mudd. As you know, giving a yes or no answer to the
    question will not be accurate----
        Mr. Kucinich. Can you answer the question?
        Mr. Towns. Gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Mudd. I will give you an accurate response, and the
    answer is that budgets are determined as a result of a back and
    forth between executives that have purview on it. His budget
    was subsequently increased from where it had been placed. He
    could not hire everybody that he needed because there was huge
    demand for risk officers all around the financial markets. So,
    we appropriately adjusted it and gave him the opportunity to
    come back in should he be able to hire above that rate. Yes.
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Kucinich. You testified you increased his budget; is
    that what you're telling this Congress?
        Mr. Mudd. We negotiated the budget the same as we did every
    year from time immemorial.
        Mr. Kucinich. Incredible.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Shays, it has been a pleasure serving with
    you over the last 20 years. It has been a delight. Of course,
    we had an opportunity to work on many issues together.
        Mr. Shays. I was reluctant to step up because I thought I
    might get a little teary eyed because I love this committee,
    and I congratulate you as being the new chairman, and ranking
    member, Mr. Darrell Issa, and I know this committee will do
    well.
        I'm also reluctant because this issue is very sore to me
    because we knew a long time ago, the train was going to crash.
    Everyone at this table knew the train was going to crash and
    the people who warned are the ones who took the hit, and you
    all just continued to make a lot of money and, ultimately, to
    the harm of the very people we wanted to help. It is kind of
    surreal, you had Richard Baker, who was pointing out that
    Fannie and Freddie had problems and they needed to have proper
    regulation. After the Financial Services Committee had a
    landmark hearing on Enron and we passed Sarbanes-Oxley, I said
    this is good, Fannie and Freddie are finally going to have to
    play by some rules, but then Richard said they are not under
    the 1933 and 1934 act so they're not going to be under
    Sarbanes-Oxley. So, I said, fine, let's deal with it, and Ed
    Markey, a Democrat, and I said, OK, let's regulate Fannie and
    Freddie like any other company. And in 2002 and 2003, well, I
    will tell you something hit the fan because every lobbyist that
    I have ever met was knocking down our door. Fannie and Freddie
    paid lobbyists to lobby for them, and they paid lobbyists on
    retainer so they wouldn't lobby against them. And so we had
    $175 million spent in 10 years on lobbying Congress, and this
    is a quasi-government organization that felt it had to
    manipulate Congress, and it did. It had a hugely weak regulator
    with OFHEO and, Mr. Raines, you didn't want a stronger
    regulator, you didn't want the 2002 act, you didn't want the
    2003 act. What fascinates me is you even argued that just to
    set aside 3 percent made sense, when banks have to set aside 8
    or 9 percent, and you're getting $90 million for your good
    work.
        It just is almost surreal to be at this hearing and to hear
    you. If I were critical of this administration, I would say
    that they cared so much about loyalty that loyalty trumped the
    truth. And they failed to hold people accountable. But, we're
    still in Congress failing to hold people accountable. Whether
    you're Republicans or Democrats, you're not being held
    accountable. I hope this new administration starts to hold
    people accountable.
        Mr. Raines, do you still believe that setting aside less
    than 3 percent for potential losses was financially wise? You
    made that argument in the Financial Services Committee. Do you
    still believe that was a wise thing to do?
        Mr. Raines. I think we have some evidence on that with
    regard to Fannie Mae's portfolio, as I understand it. The
    requirement for capital was approximately 2\1/2\ percent for
    the mortgage portfolio, the on-balance sheet portfolio, and
    there have not been losses in that area that have exceeded that
    capital. The losses that Fannie Mae has reported, as I
    understand them, have come from the credit side, not from the
    portfolio side. So, based on this unique experience, it appears
    that is sufficient capital for a portfolio.
        Mr. Shays. Mr. Raines, you're not just speaking to this
    committee. You're speaking to the whole financial sector. You
    are making the argument that setting aside only 3 percent was
    financially a wise thing to do. I'm not going to change your
    answer. I just want to make sure that you with a straight face
    are saying that was a wise thing to do.
        Mr. Raines. It is proven in the current circumstances
    that----
        Mr. Shays. I would like a yes or no. Yes, it was, or no, it
    wasn't.
        Mr. Raines. It has worked. Congressman, it worked with
    regard to the portfolio. On the credit business, it's a
    different thing. And we were talking in the committee, in
    Financial Services Committee, about the portfolio because
    ironically the criticism of Fannie Mae in those days was its
    on-balance sheet portfolio, which in fact has not been the
    problem now. The problem has been the credit business that
    people were arguing that is all that Fannie Mae should do, was
    the credit business.
        Mr. Shays. Mr. Raines, when we finally got Fannie and
    Freddie to agree to be under the 1934 act, we learned that both
    Fannie and Freddie had cooked their books, overstated income,
    and you ultimately had to leave. I'm just curious to know, do
    you still believe that Fannie shouldn't be under the 1933 and
    1934 act and play by the rules that no one else has to play by?
        Mr. Raines. At this point, I don't think it matters. Fannie
    Mae is already registered with the SEC; so, including Fannie
    Mae as a registrant----
        Mr. Shays. On the 1934 act.
        Mr. Raines. I understand. I was going to get to that. You
    mentioned both acts, I believe. With regard to the
    registration, I don't think it matters a lot. With regard to
    the overall registration of its securities, particularly
    mortgage-backed securities, I think that the damage that I
    foresaw at that time would be less now, given all the
    convulsions that have already gone on in the marketplace, I
    think that the market for mortgage-backed securities are going
    to have be to reconstructed anyway. So, I think it's just a
    matter of process at this point. But, I don't think it matters
    one way or the other.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that Mr.
    Shays have just 1 additional minute. Thank you.
        Mr. Shays. Just a bottom line question: In other words, the
    1933 and 1934 act were designed to protect the public. Fannie
    and Freddie are not under the 1933 act. They voluntarily got
    under the 1934 act. Because they got under it is when we
    learned that they couldn't comply with basic accounting
    standards. That is when we learned it. Had we not put them
    under the 1934 act we never would have learned that. And your
    comment to me is it doesn't matter if they're under the 1933 or
    1934 act?
        Mr. Raines. No. I said that because Fannie Mae is now a
    registrant, it would be redundant to include them. But, if you
    would like to include them under the act, I think that is fine.
    I don't think it would change anything about the registration.
        Mr. Shays. How about the 1933 act?
        Mr. Raines. 1933 act. As I said, I am fearful it would
    disrupt the mortgage-backed securities market. Right now, the
    market is so disrupted, I don't know adding a registration
    requirement would do any more harm.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you.
        Mr. Clay.
        Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Fannie and Freddie lost
    a significant share of the secondary mortgage market by 2004,
    as private Wall Street companies bought increased numbers of
    subprime and Alt-A loans. Mr. Mudd, I want to ask about
    decisions Fannie made to regain some of this ground.
        On June 26 and 27, 2006, Fannie Mae executives attended a
    retreat in Cambridge, MD, for a senior management group. The
    committee obtained a document that lists the highlights from
    that meeting. The document was circulated to you and other top
    executives on July 7, 2006. The document summarizes what we
    accomplished, the key take-away from our sessions, the open
    issues to address and corporate strategies, next steps. Under
    the section titled ``New Business Modeling Growth
    Initiatives,'' the memo describes a new approach for Fannie
    Mae's Single Family Mortgage Division. It says this. ``Single
    family strategy is to say yes to our customers by increasing
    purchases of subprime and Alt-A loans.''
        Mr. Mudd, based on this summary, there was detailed
    discussion at the retreat in 2006 about whether to enter the
    subprime and Alt-A market, and the decision was made to say yes
    to these types of loans. The memo says this initiative will
    generate attractive returns, but was there any discussion about
    the increased risk involved?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes, sir, that was an intimate discussion in the
    process, and so, when we first entered the subprime market, and
    I would fast forward to the end of the story to say once we got
    there, we realized we didn't like it that much, so it didn't
    grow very much, but the analysis that you're asking about at
    the time was if we enter this market, what are the appropriate
    forms of risk mitigation and so forth. So, typically, what we
    did was we actually bought bonds in small numbers and we bought
    the highest rated AAA tranches of those bonds and in some cases
    actually bought supplemental insurance on top of these bonds.
    That then gave us some exposure to the marketplace that we
    could evaluate and assess whether it was a market we could be
    in. And by the way, we also set standards that said those bonds
    had to be, the loans, any subprime loans we were involved in
    had to be originated under a very specific set of conditions
    that gave us some assurance there would be no predatory
    features in them.
        So, with those two pillars, we had some exposure to market.
    We saw it. We didn't like it that much, and that is why you see
    from the numbers it didn't grow very quickly.
        Mr. Clay. OK. Fannie acted quickly on this new business
    model. For example, Fannie purchased more than $200 billion in
    Alt-A loans in 2006 and 2007, according to the data provided to
    this committee by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In
    retrospect, it seems that the decision made at this retreat in
    2006 to increase your company's purchases of subprime and Alt-A
    mortgages was a major mistake. Do you agree?
        Mr. Mudd. Well, again, separating out the subprime and the
    Alt-A, now addressing the Alt-A, can you look back in
    retrospect and say that you wish you had less Alt-A business?
    Yes, absolutely.
        Mr. Clay. Well, the numbers speak for themselves. I think
    you know last month, Fannie reported almost $4.3 billion in
    credit losses for 2008 so far. Almost half of these losses came
    from your investments in the risky Alt-A mortgages, especially
    those that originated in 2006 and 2007. Do you agree with that?
        Mr. Mudd. Certainly a high proportion of losses has come
    out of, has come out of the Alt-A book, yes, and certainly if
    you look back in retrospect and say based on what you know now,
    would you have as much exposure in Alt-A, no, you wouldn't.
    But, based on the information that we had at the time, based on
    where we saw the market at the time, based on the evolution of
    our own standards and based on the prudential things that we
    did and got a lot of criticism for, increasing price,
    increasing standards, requiring more documentation was there
    was important. And by the way, the Alt-A loans on Fannie Mae
    books have performed a factor of 2 better than any of the Alt-A
    loans in the marketplace at large. So, I think some of those
    processes were helpful. Were they ultimately helpful enough?
    Goes to your question.
        Mr. Clay. Thank you very much for your response. The memo
    also said we discussed additional growth ideas that warrant
    further exploration, including a new acquisitions method to buy
    all loans. What does it mean to have a policy to buy all loans?
    That doesn't sound like risk is considered at all.
        Mr. Mudd. No, it doesn't, and that wasn't in fact the
    policy, Congressman. The challenge that we were facing in the
    marketplace at that time was because of the footprint or, what
    we called it, the box of loans that Fannie Mae would actually
    accept. Originators were originating product that was outside
    that box. It was difficult for them to segregate the loans that
    they could only sell to Fannie Mae from the ``all other''
    category. So, we had a number of initiatives in place to say
    could we provide an upfront solution, so they would have kind
    of one-stop shopping, but that we would never take on those
    risks that were either risks that we didn't like or risks that
    we couldn't price for or loans that were perhaps jumbos or
    something like that. That was the subject of that study.
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        But, he can answer the question.
        Mr. Mudd. I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman. I didn't hear the
    question.
        Mr. Clay. The question was you took bundles that were
    combined with good and bad mortgages, good and bad loans.
        Mr. Mudd. No. The purpose of that project was specifically
    not to take the loans that we weren't comfortable with, but to
    continue to attract the business of our customers. That was the
    traditional business that we had done or the business that we
    could price and were comfortable with.
        Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Brendsel. Mr. Chairman, I apologize. Could I take a
    brief break?
        Mr. Towns. Sure.
        Mr. Syron. Mr. Chairman, while that is occurring, may I
    accompany?
        Mr. Towns. I'm sorry?
        Mr. Syron. May I do the same thing while that is occurring?
        Mr. Towns. Why don't we just take a 5-minute recess.
        [Recess.]
        Mr. Towns. The committee will reconvene.
        We will now recognize the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Turner,
    for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Raines, I want to read you a portion of your written
    testimony. You make a statement that I think is very important
    in your written testimony that I agree with about the CRA. In
    your statement, you say a very common allegation that has been
    made is that the Committee Reinvestment Act forced mortgage
    originators to make loans that were too risky and burdened
    banks with assets that would later default. It's on page 11.
    This claim is incorrect. The most risky loans in the system
    tended to be originated by lenders not covered by CRA. The
    statement that you're making there. I hear from a lot of CRA-
    covered banks, lenders, who then go the next step though and
    say that they're not as at fault or at fault for the mortgage
    lending crisis because their loans, which they originated, were
    not those that many of us would identify as predatory or even
    in the subprime area.
        My thoughts in that are that by their actually then buying
    the mortgage-backed securities of these subprime or these
    predatory loans, they're providing the fuel back for those
    types of loans that they claim that they weren't originating;
    in other words, from the back door, buy those things that
    they're not selling out the front door, and then provide
    gasoline or fuel to allow more of those loans to occur, and so,
    their having participated in purchasing those and then using
    their capital to buy them helped fund what was the practice--
    what were the practices that in fact were the problem. Would
    you agree with that?
        Mr. Raines. Well, I think you have a very legitimate point
    as to at what stage are you providing necessary funds to the
    market and at what stage have you moved over into encouraging
    practices that aren't good market practices? Most subprime
    loans go to people, you know, like my father, who simply didn't
    have a lot of income and didn't have a great credit rating, and
    he had to go to the finance company to get financed. That is
    what an original subprime loan was, you went to HFC, and they
    gave you a loan, and it was backed by your house that you had
    some equity in. Over time, as I point out in my testimony,
    these loans morphed into other things. Instead of it being a
    loan on your house that you already own, that you have equity,
    subprime loans became loans to buy houses where you had no
    equity. Instead of being people who had a long track record of
    paying their bills but just simply every now and then fell
    behind, it became people who have just gotten out of
    bankruptcy. So, not all subprime loans are bad. A chunk of them
    have been very bad for consumers. And it's hard for your banker
    to know in the mortgage-backed security that he is buying, does
    this only include the good ones or does this also include
    predatory ones? That is why as early as 1999 we published
    standards on subprime lending as to what Fannie Mae would buy
    or wouldn't buy to try to establish some standards in the
    market.
        Mr. Turner. But, they did know. They did know both from the
    information that was being received on the default rates, the
    foreclosure rates, the sloppy underwriting processes, the lack
    of documentation, the loan-to-value ratios that had been
    changed, they did know that these were the more risky ones and
    that these were those that you would not want to encourage
    either for a borrower or really for the assets for the overall
    bank. And I don't want to go to the next step, Mr. Raines,
    because you said exactly what I thought you would say, which I
    agree with, that where do you cross the line of actually
    encouraging bad behavior versus just participating in the
    market? And that is what I believe that Freddie and Fannie did.
    It's not just the CRA-covered bank that had one originating
    loan standard in the front door and bought mortgage-backed
    securities out the back that had bad standards. It was Freddie
    and Fannie, also. You provided fuel, all of you gentlemen, by
    providing fuel for these loans. By buying them up, you
    encouraged an area of the market to both expand, recapitalizing
    them so that they can go out and do more of these, without
    providing the types of standards necessary to protect the
    borrowers, to protect the public or to protect your
    shareholders.
        Mr. Syron, you stated that the market had migrated away
    from traditional loans. You're supposed to be an organization
    that has a knowledge that tradition is not just based on some
    archaic structure that we all knew when my parents first went
    to buy their first home. It's based upon sound business
    principles. Mr. Syron, you went on to say we were doing what we
    needed to to serve our shareholders. Your shareholders haven't
    been served. I can't imagine one of you today can sit here
    today and say the conditions of your companies are such that
    you were following practices that were shareholder directed.
    They weren't borrower directed. They weren't, our Federal
    mortgage processes directed, and they certainly haven't served
    the taxpayer.
        Mr. Syron. Sir, a couple of points. First, I think you're
    absolutely correct that even though a lot of these changes
    provided other opportunities that, in retrospect, you would
    have been a lot better off if the market had stayed in its more
    traditional source. But neither Fannie----
        Mr. Turner. Didn't you have a role in that? Didn't you have
    an ability to raise your hand and say what needs to be done on
    the regulatory side to prevent the market from migrating there
    and have a role to not enter that market area by funding it and
    fueling it?
        Mr. Syron. Well, sir, we didn't have any capacity to
    constrain the growth of that market, is what I would say. And
    the second part of your question, I think that what we did, and
    I really firmly believe this, is I'm not saying we didn't make
    mistakes, we did what we thought was the right thing at the
    time, but you're absolutely right; it's hard to say that the
    shareholders or any of us, who were shareholders, have
    benefited from that.
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Lynch.
        Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and briefly, I just
    want to congratulate Chairman Waxman, in his absence, for his
    great work on this committee as well. He will be sorely missed.
    I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the time, and also to
    the ranking member.
        Mr. Chairman, I would ask that the American Enterprise
    Institute article entitled ``The Last Trillion Dollar
    Commitment: The Destruction of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,'' by
    Peter J. Wallison and Charles W. Calomiris, be entered into the
    record.
        Mr. Towns. Without objection, so ordered.
        [The information referred to follows:]

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        Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just as an initial
    matter of clarification, it was asked earlier by the ranking
    member, I believe, whether 660 was used as your dividing line
    for Alt-A mortgages, Mr. Mudd, and probably you as well, Mr.
    Syron. I'm looking at some Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac documents
    here, and it appears that you use the FICO score of 620 as the
    dividing line, is that right?
        Mr. Mudd. In our case----
        Mr. Lynch. Please don't burn my time. This is just a simple
    matter. Is it 620 or 660?
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Mr. Lynch. No?
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Mr. Lynch. You use 660 then.
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Mr. Lynch. You don't use 660, you don't use 620. What do
    you use?
        Mr. Mudd. The original definition of a subprime loan was
    based upon the originator. When the market developed other
    definitions, we disclosed based on the other definitions, that
    were used in the marketplace.
        Mr. Lynch. OK. This is consistent. You know what I can tell
    you right now? If you have accomplished anything here today,
    you have made conservatorship look very, very good. I was very
    worried about that decision to put these organizations in
    conservatorship. But what I have seen here today, with the
    total denial that is going on here today and the refusal to
    answer simple questions whether you put the budget up or you
    put the budget down, and you can't answer that, it just gives
    me great comfort, great reassurance that these two GSEs are now
    in the hands of the conservators because I can see what led us
    into this problem just by the way you have been failing to
    respond. Despite all the denials of what is going on here, I
    happen to have some of the documents that were submitted here.
    This is a 10Q investor summary for the quarter ended June 30,
    2008, and, let's see, Fannie reported that, this is for Fannie
    Mae, that subprime characteristics, mortgages with subprime
    characteristics comprised substantial percentages of all 2005
    through 2007 mortgages that the company acquired. And there's
    some tables here that are shown as well. If you add up, this is
    Fannie's report, if you add up the categories, and eliminate
    double counting, and this is also in the Wallison-Calomiris
    article, it appears that on June 30, 2008, the reporting date
    just after the time that you left, I believe, Mr. Mudd, around
    the time that you left, Fannie either held or had guaranteed
    subprime and Alt-A loans, however that is defined, with an
    unpaid principal balance of $553 billion. In addition,
    according to the same Fannie Mae report, the company also held
    $29.5 billion of Alt-A loans and $36.3 billion of subprime
    loans that it had purchased as private label securities. And
    these figures amount to the grand total of $619 billion and
    reflect a huge commitment to the purchase of mortgages of
    questionable quality between 2005-2007.
        We also appointed, as I said before, we have a new
    regulator in town, a new sheriff, and I'm going to quote from
    him, this is Jim Lockhart, who now heads up the FHFA. Here is
    what he says. This is in a report that he gave. Fannie Mae and
    Freddie Mac purchased and guaranteed many more low doc, low
    verification, and nonstandard mortgages in the 2006 and 2007
    years than they had in the past, roughly 33 percent of the
    company's business involving buying or guaranteeing these risky
    mortgages compared with 14 percent in 2005. Those bad debts on
    mortgages led to billions of dollars in losses at these two
    firms and affected the capacity to raise capital to absorb
    further losses and forced them to go to the Treasury for
    support.
        Now, let me ask you, the way we set up this whole
    organization where you have, as we've said before, you have an
    obligation to your shareholders, and we've talked about that,
    my colleague previously mentioned that, there is also the
    liquidity function here, and you're trying to shore up the
    markets. We're going to have to look further down the road at
    the possibility perhaps of going into a receivership, and
    Fannie and Freddie will go away.
        Do you think, in looking back, that created a conflict,
    your obligation to the shareholder where you're going for
    return, and I know that is what you were going for with some of
    this stuff here. This was making a lot of money at one point.
    Is that a core problem with the way these organizations are
    structured now? And I will just take my answer and yield back
    my time. Thank you.
        Mr. Mudd. Congressman, first, I would apologize. I was--you
    asked a question about the definitions, and I wanted to be as
    precise as I could, and if I can followup by writing
    individually I will. I don't mean not to answer your question
    in any way.
        Mr. Lynch. That would be great.
        Mr. Mudd. On the second question, what I found personally
    was that due to the hybrid nature of the company, a private
    company with a public mission, that charter, that structure
    gives rise to a number of challenges that become conflicts that
    become this very difficult balancing act that you describe
    between shareholders, homeowners, taxpayers, capital,
    liquidity, stability, which market to be in. In a good market,
    in a rising market, it's possible to make the tradeoffs to keep
    that balance in a pretty effective place. In a crisis of these
    proportions, you can't manage the dial and, as you know from
    your work on the Financial Services Committee, you could see
    that some of the dials we had to sub-optimize, whether it was
    in terms of the affordable housing mission or the liquidity
    mission, at any given point in time.
        So, yes, I think the current structure needs to be
    revisited, but my hope would be to revisit it in the context of
    what Congress wants the overall housing finance market and the
    government's involvement in that to look like, thence how
    Fannie and Freddie fit into it rather than having an answer
    provided for Fannie and Freddie, and then the rest of the
    market gets rebuilt around that without sufficient debate and
    examination.
        Mr. Lynch. Mr. Syron, would you like to have a crack at
    that just briefly?
        Mr. Syron. Yes, sir. I think, as I said, these
    organizations have provided a lot of value in the past. There
    has been a lot of change going on. I agree with Mr. Mudd
    completely that we have to look at how this fits into the whole
    system and with, very quickly with respect to the balancing of
    the three, I think in an up market it was a lot easier, but
    essentially what you were trying to do in these companies, you
    could never make any one of the three completely happy. It was
    how you could sort of minimize the unhappiness and make it
    feasible.
        Thank you.
        Mr. Lynch. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your forbearance.
    Thank you, sir. I yield back.
        Mr. Towns. Gentleman from California, Mr. Bilbray.
        Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gentlemen, a
    colleague of mine used the reference ``perfect storm.'' Can we
    agree that this was not an act of God, it wasn't just something
    that happened, that this was a situation that was created,
    nurtured, and triggered by human activity? Can we agree to
    that? Or do you agree with a perfect storm that just this
    happens, and there was nothing anybody could do about it?
        Mr. Raines. Congressman, if you're addressing the question
    to me, I agree with you; it's a result of human beings making
    decisions, and I laid out in my written testimony how not only
    in this storm, but in other storms, it's going to result in
    human beings making a variety of decisions in the financial
    markets.
        Mr. Bilbray. My concern is I feel like in 10, 15 years I'm
    going to have power plant owners come to us for all of these
    grants because their power plants are being washed out by major
    storm activity and say we had nothing to do with this;
    greenhouse gases, who would have thought? But, all I'm saying
    down the line, there were contributing factors here. OK, it
    wasn't an act of God. When you looked at the market, the
    residential housing market and the increase that we were seeing
    over a period of time, far beyond what we saw in the 1970's,
    the other climbs we've seen before, was anybody suspicious at
    all that as we say in the environmental community, that this
    bubble was not sustainable, that if you look at the population
    growth, both birth rate and immigration, it didn't justify the
    market expansion that we saw? Did it? When we saw the way this
    market was growing, where was the market coming from? Where was
    the demand coming from?
        Now, Greenspan testified that there were two major factors:
    One, major portion of foreign investment coming in and buying
    paper and creating an artificial, basically the fact of sight
    unseen you get this paper out there, we will buy it, and the
    values kept going. A lot of that being our own petrodollars
    coming back from the Third World. But, the other part you have
    to admit was that the expanded market that you were creating by
    going out on this thin ice with this Alt-A, this really was
    going out on ice.
        Can you at least admit that a contributing factor was the
    entire industry going out on this thin ice and broadening the
    market that created the bubble? Because you keep saying once
    the bubble popped, what could we do? But, the creation of the
    bubble itself, this artificial inflated market out there, was
    not an act of God. It was an act of foreign, massive foreign
    capital coming in far beyond what was reasonable, and the
    expansion of the market and not just to low income, but middle
    class. I have a constituent, five defaults, no, seven defaults
    she had on people buying and selling the market. Can you at
    least admit that the bubble was created partially by the
    institutions that were out there creating, giving loans to
    people who never should have qualified, thus broadening the
    market and inflating the value?
        Mr. Mudd. I would say that the expansion of credit that
    went all the way back to the 1990's and went through the
    consumer sector as well as the commercial sector, combined with
    the lack of affordable housing and the increase in housing
    prices, all built up that bubble, yes.
        Mr. Bilbray. But, Mr. Mudd, let's talk about self-creating
    the crisis. Didn't the availability and the expansion of the
    market through giving loans that weren't qualified was a major
    contributing factor to the acceleration, to the appreciation of
    residential housing? The cost was going up because you were
    responding to a tip.
        Mr. Mudd. Congressman, I think you rightly describe it as a
    circular problem and the more one thing happened, the more it
    led to the other thing. And the more the homes were
    unaffordable, the more the products got stretched in order to
    create products that people who 5 years before might not have
    been qualified, could be qualified today, and that then led
    to----
        Mr. Bilbray. Just by the act, be it good intention or not,
    be it Congress or be it the private sector, providing the
    market to people who couldn't afford it was causing the price
    of affordability to move out beyond them some more because it
    did contribute to the inflationary, the appreciation of real
    estate because you had more people that were in the market that
    could buy than you have otherwise, right?
        Mr. Raines. You were describing a classic financial bubble.
    And I think you're right. And as I tried to set forth in
    testimony, in my written testimony, we have seen this again and
    again and again, that this is how we end up in financial crises
    by ordinary products being morphed into something different,
    and then, it keeps feeding on itself until a point in which
    time when the market can no longer support it.
        Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Raines, I was involved 18 years with
    affordable housing. Explain to me how you can provide
    affordable housing to people who can't afford it normally, and
    at a time that income and salaries are static, basically static
    over 20 years, while the price of housing is skyrocketing, the
    gap was growing. How do you maintain the ability for that
    population to stay in the market that is moving beyond them
    without somewhere down the road subsidizing them one way or the
    other, filling that gap? How does the public sector do that
    without somebody filling that gap with a subsidy?
        Mr. Towns. Gentleman's time has expired, but he can answer.
        Mr. Raines. I think you and I have probably spent a similar
    period of time with affordable housing, and I think the answer
    is in that circumstance, there has to be a subsidy. We were
    lucky during much of the 1990's, that we had incomes rising
    faster and therefore, with some engineering, you could help
    people who were close to the edge to get into housing. But, at
    a time when home prices were rising as quickly as they were in
    the early part of this decade, it made it almost impossible for
    affordable housing to work.
        Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Chairman, let me point out that I think
    the bailout was the hidden subsidy, not just the low income but
    middle income, to go into markets that they shouldn't get into
    and this bailout ought to be recognized as the end product of
    the fact that there was a subsidy, and that subsidy was the
    bailout and the taxpayers are paying right now to subsidize
    those decisions that were made over the last two decades.
        Thank you very much, gentlemen. I appreciate it.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you. The gentleman from Illinois, Mr.
    Davis.
        Mr. Davis of Illinois. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I too want
    to thank the gentlemen for being here. I have two basic
    questions for the panel. They are, what mistakes did you make
    that may have contributed to the current financial crisis? And
    what can we learn from these mistakes to guide us as we reform
    and reshape Freddie and Fannie?
        Let me just begin with you, Mr. Mudd. You were quoted in
    the New York Times on August 5, 2008, as saying you have the
    worst housing crisis in U.S. recorded history, and we're the
    largest housing finance company in the country, so when one
    goes down, the other goes with it, end of the quotation.
        Do you believe that your company's financial strategies
    played no role in its problems? Can you look back and identify
    any decisions you made that ultimately were harmful to your
    company and may have contributed to the crisis?
        Mr. Mudd. I can, Congressman. And thank you for the
    question.
        I think that the structure of the companies as monoline
    companies in the housing industry, in a housing market like
    this, presents a challenge and ought to be considered going
    forward because you don't have the ability, as another
    financial institution would, to diversify. So, when the housing
    market goes down, the commercial market goes up, and there is
    some balancing.
        In that light, what do I wish I had done differently? I
    wish I had gone earlier in the process to the regulator, to the
    Treasury Department and said, you know, we are--we are
    struggling to maintain this balance between affordability,
    liquidity, and capital and funding and housing goals and cost.
    Which one do you want us to emphasize? Because the longer that
    we keep trying to balance these areas and be the sole source of
    support in a declining housing market, the more difficult
    challenge this becomes. So, that is one thing that I wish I had
    done differently.
        I wish I had stayed longer and had been able to help more
    with the foreclosure problem which has now come to the fore.
    That, as you know, is really the place where the rubber meets
    the road on this. When I was there, we were able to modify, I
    think, about 200,000 loans in order to help people either
    refinance and save for loans or avoid a foreclosure. I think it
    is apparent now, in retrospect, that more sooner to avoid those
    foreclosures would have been better for the overall market.
        Mr. Davis of Illinois. Thank you very much. Let me ask you,
    Mr. Raines. I would like to hear your view about what mistakes
    were made either during your tenure or after you left.
        Mr. Raines. Well, I would--I'm sorry. I would point to a
    couple of things during my tenure that I wish had been done
    differently.
        I wish we could have gotten a regulatory bill relating to
    Fannie and Freddie enacted earlier because I think that the
    battle over Fannie and Freddie was a distraction to the
    companies, to our regulator, as well as to other parts of the
    financial system regulatory process. So, I wish that we could
    have gotten that done at a much earlier stage in time, which I
    think would, in these times, have provided some real assurance
    to the market about the future of the companies.
        I also wish that we had been able to complete, before I
    left the process, fully entrenching the risk management
    approach to credit that we had worked out over a couple-year
    period that I believe would have been helpful to my successors
    in managing the extraordinary credit issues that they had to
    face after I left.
        With regard to my successors, I'm really not in a position
    to judge them. I don't have the facts. I wasn't there. It would
    be unfair for me to say, Well, sitting here today, here is what
    I would have done differently. I tried in my testimony simply
    to point out what I thought were the facts that the company has
    disclosed, but I don't truly feel in a position to critique
    what they are doing without knowing what they know.
        Mr. Davis of Illinois. Thank you very much.
        Let me just quickly ask Mr. Syron and Mr. Brendsel,
    answering the same questions, could you indicate any feeling of
    mistakes or errors or things that could have been done
    differently?
        Mr. Syron. Yes, sir. What I wish we had done--and we tried
    to do this--is insisted on more precision or some precision in
    how these tradeoffs should have been dealt with. For example, I
    had suggested that simple regulatory language that said that we
    should have--we needed to be fulsome on our mission, be safe
    and sound and provide a return to shareholders that was
    competitive.
        I mean, I think something that would have helped in
    determining how this balance should be met over time.
        Mr. Brendsel. Thank you. Yes, of course, I was the CEO of
    Freddie Mac for a long time, and over the course of those
    years, I made many mistakes in the process. And I learned from
    mistakes as well. And I think certainly what I learned is,
    strong controls over credit and credit policies are critical to
    the long-term survival not only of the organization but also of
    homeowners and the Nation.
        Beyond that, though, I left in 2003, and at the time, I
    felt that our approach in the subprime market focusing, being
    very conservative and cautious, was the appropriate one. And I
    think that has proven to be true.
        I can't say really what has happened since then, in terms
    of the decisions that were made. The appropriateness of the
    decisions is clear based on public statements that the subprime
    investments have proven to be a problem for Freddie Mac and
    Fannie Mae subsequently.
        But, certainly with regard to regrets, I think the issue
    about a strong, professional regulator that is credible and has
    the confidence of the public, of Members of Congress, and of
    investors is of critical importance and continues to be. And I
    think that was at least a source of concern in the early 2000's
    that I would have--as Mr. Raines said, I think--I wish I had
    been more effective in working toward.
        Finally, of course, as has been briefly mentioned, Freddie
    Mac did go through restatement in 2003. It is interesting, of
    course, that the statement resulted in Freddie Mac reporting
    more income rather than less. But, nevertheless, that
    restatement happened under my watch as a CEO; and I wish that,
    No. 1, the restatement had not been necessary, and I still
    continue to kind of search through what I might have done
    differently in that regard.
        Mr. Towns [presiding]. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Davis of Illinois. Gentlemen, thank you very much.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Towns. Congressman Sali of Idaho.
        Mr. Sali. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Gentlemen, I have to tell you I'm a little surprised that
    I'm getting this impression that all of you feel that Fannie
    and Freddie and the difficulties that we find ourselves in now
    are just because you were victims of a market.
        Mr. Syron, I think you described the mission for your
    organization while you were there as liquidity, affordability,
    and stability. Did I get those three right?
        Mr. Syron. Yes, sir.
        Mr. Sali. Well, I think that each of you would agree that--
    I don't know what the exact numbers are, but somewhere around
    close to half of the residential market was funded through
    Freddie and Fannie together. In fact, it has been described as
    two GSEs that were too big to fail.
        You do all agree with that characterization, don't you?
    Does anybody disagree with that characterization?
        OK, fine.
        We heard a description earlier that there was this perfect
    storm, and I think, as Congressman Bilbray pointed out, the
    storm is an act of God and there is no control over that. You
    would all agree that as the biggest stakeholder in the
    residential mortgage market that you will have a significant
    impact on that market?
        Does anybody disagree with that?
        OK.
        And you probably agree that it is not unreasonable to give
    the biggest stakeholder in the residential mortgage market the
    mission of bringing stability to that market.
        Does anybody disagree with that?
        And given that the Alt-A loans failed, I think at something
    like 10 times the rate of other loans and that at the time they
    were being made, they were mockingly referred to as ``liar
    loans,'' none of you would disagree that both Fannie and
    Freddie really failed in their mission, their charge of adding
    stability to the market by trying to meet the market with those
    Alt-A loans.
        Does anybody disagree with that?
        Mr. Mudd. Yeah, Congressman, I would disagree respectfully
    in the sense that it is necessary to maintain a balance during
    that. I don't think that market share is a primary indicator of
    whether the company is being successful or not. It is a
    secondary indicator that says, are you remaining relevant to
    the market. People continuing----
        Mr. Sali. But, we are not talking about success. We're
    talking about stability. And Alt-A loans failing at 10 times
    the rate of other loans, that is not going to add stability to
    the market, is it? You'd agree with that?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes.
        Mr. Sali. OK. Now, each of you would agree that during your
    time at Fannie and Freddie you received more in bonuses than
    you did in your salaries. That is a correct assessment, isn't
    it?
        Does anybody disagree with that?
        And that would be true, Mr. Raines, in spite of that claw
    back that took back part, you still received more in bonuses
    than you did your salary. And those bonuses increased at least
    in part on the pursuit and the resulting increased levels of
    Alt-A and/or subprime loans.
        Do any of you disagree with that?
        Mr. Raines. I would disagree with that.
        Mr. Sali. There was no part of your bonuses that was based
    on increased levels of Alt-A loans?
        Mr. Raines. That was not one of our goals in our
    compensation system to increase Alt-A loans, no.
        Mr. Sali. Because of the number of Alt-A loans, your
    bonuses went up. Is that a fair statement? Because of the
    amount, the total amount of loans that were given?
        Mr. Raines. I don't believe so, no.
        Mr. Sali. It didn't increase the amount of total loans that
    were given?
        Mr. Raines. Alt-A loans can increase the total volume of
    loans you have, but that doesn't----
        Mr. Sali. Yes. And that increased your bonuses, didn't it?
        Mr. Raines. No. It was not based on volume. It was based on
    profitability and pricing. So, if you----
        Mr. Sali. So, if you have more volume, you have more
    profit; is that correct?
        Mr. Raines. Not necessarily. As we can see, having a lot of
    volume can create a lot of losses. So, there was no necessary
    relationship between volume and profit. You hope you have both.
    But, you have to work hard to get the profit part. The volume
    part is not that hard.
        Mr. Sali. OK. So, your bonuses--you're saying that your
    bonuses are based on volume and that the Alt-A loans had no
    bearing on----
        Mr. Raines. I said my bonuses were not based on volume.
        Mr. Sali. Not based on volume, based on profitability; and
    that the Alt-A loans had nothing at all to do with the level of
    bonus that you got?
        Mr. Raines. I said that the profitability of Alt-A loans,
    just like any other loans, would have an impact on the bonus.
        Mr. Sali. OK. Did the fact that there were more Alt-A loans
    that were funded by Fannie and Freddie, did it increase your
    bonuses at all?
        Mr. Raines. In my case, I don't believe so, but I would
    have to go back to 2004. Remember, I left in 2004; so, I would
    have to go back to 2004 to see what impact it had. Alt-A loans
    were a very small percentage of the book of business when I was
    there. So, I don't believe it had any impact on my bonus.
        Mr. Sali. It had no impact at all on the bonuses that you
    received? Is that your testimony today?
        Mr. Raines. I don't believe it did. That's what--I believe
    it did not, because it was such a small part of our business in
    2004.
        Mr. Sali. It had no impact on your bonuses?
        Mr. Raines. I don't believe it did.
        Mr. Sali. Is that true for the rest of you as well?
        Mr. Brendsel. Yes. The last time I received a bonus was for
    the year 2001, and certainly it wasn't based on the amount of
    Alt-A mortgages that----
        Mr. Sali. OK. I'm not asking--I'm not asking about the
    level. I'm asking about the fact that there were more Alt-A
    loans given, that you were trying to meet the market. Each of
    you agrees with me that is what you were trying to do, that
    increased your bonus.
        Do you disagree with that?
        Mr. Raines. I think you have to--in the case of Mr.
    Brendsel and myself, I think you have to separate--the Alt-A
    market became dramatically larger later. It was growing during
    this time. But, as a percentage of the book of business through
    2004, the company's numbers show it was a small part of the
    business. My last bonus was 2003; his was 2001.
        Mr. Sali. Let me ask Mr. Mudd and Mr. Syron. Is that true
    for you, that the Alt-A loans increased your bonuses?
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Mudd. No, Congressman, because the goals that I had for
    most of that period reflected a wide range of things that
    weren't simply financial and would have included restatement,
    regulatory settlements, and a number of other things. So, there
    weren't explicit goals tied to any given area, A.
        And, B, the compensation was decided by an independent
    committee that I wasn't a member of. So, part of the answer I
    think, Mr. Raines and I, probably all of us would deal with is,
    we were not in the room at the time the discussion was being
    held. So, you have to factor that in mind, I believe.
        Mr. Syron. Sir, we also had a compensation committee
    comprised of the independent directors. We had a balance
    scorecard, the most important things on the balance scorecard
    were becoming SEC registered and getting financial statements
    for 6 years supplied.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Yarmuth.
        Mr. Yarmuth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I'd like to also
    add for the record my congratulations and thanks to Chairman
    Waxman for the great leadership that he has provided this
    committee over the last 2 years.
        To Mr. Syron and Mr. Mudd, you both said, and I think in
    response to Mr. Lynch's question, that you didn't have a
    problem handling things when values were going up; you could
    keep all these accounts in balance and so forth. And one of the
    things that I think we have learned in this series of hearings
    we have had on the financial crisis is that there are a lot of
    smart people when things are going well, and then people are
    smart until they are not smart; and one of the things that has
    happened is when things turn bad, and through across the
    spectrum, people have not been able to handle it well. Or the
    institutions haven't.
        The other thing we have learned is, in case after case, we
    found institutions that were extremely highly leveraged. I
    mean, the case of Lehman Brothers was basically a 30-to-1
    leverage rate risk versus their capital. And that has been
    pretty consistent throughout--across the board. In May of this
    year, the New York Times reported that your companies had net
    capital of about $83 billion and that was against $5 trillion
    worth of debt, which is a leverage ratio of more than 50 to 1.
        In retrospect, to both of you, do you think your companies
    were overly leveraged? Is that a problem that--was that one of
    the contributing factors to this crisis that you find yourself
    in or found yourselves in?
        Mr. Syron. Well, I think in retrospect, sir, we've learned
    that the entire financial system, and if I may say so, the
    household sector and the government sector in the United States
    was overleveraged.
        I think our concern about leverage was that we would have
    the same capital ratios, if you will--or leverage ratios, for
    the same type of assets is the point we made all the time--that
    our competitors would. I think they could have been higher for
    everybody.
        Mr. Yarmuth. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. If, hypothetically, I were running the company on
    a going-forward basis, and I had the benefit of being able to
    factor in the real-world experience of 2007 and 2008 into the
    models and into the estimates, that data would introduce--there
    is a much wider degree of variability than was ever seen in the
    history of the U.S. housing market. So, some of the question
    you're asking is, I think, going to be self-solving not just
    for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but for other financial
    institutions as well simply because the data of a crisis of
    these proportions didn't exist before, they say, 1938.
        I learned the other day that the last time the Bank of
    England got rates this low was 1641. So, people have gone back
    quite a long ways to try to find this level of dislocation.
        Mr. Yarmuth. And going back to the question of leverage,
    though, was there ever any discussion internally in your
    operations about whether your risk was in excess of your----
        Mr. Mudd. We actually had raised capital and were carrying
    capital during this past year that was significantly higher
    than regulatory standards, so--and we recognize that and I had
    said publicly this is the type of market in which you want to
    be low in capital.
        So, I think while--I don't know how you would debate the
    numbers, but the philosophy of wanting to go into a difficult
    market with strong capital is important; and also for folks to
    remember the reason that you have capital on the sunny days is
    so that you can weather the rainy days, and it shouldn't be a
    surprise that capital goes down as a crisis becomes more
    pointed.
        Mr. Yarmuth. So, I take it--and I'm not trying to say--I'm
    not questioning or second-guessing with hindsight your judgment
    at the time. But you had more leverage than you should have
    had? You were overleveraged in light of the circumstances?
        Mr. Mudd. We were carrying the--we were carrying capital
    that was not only met, but exceeded all of the regulatory
    standards.
        Mr. Yarmuth. I understand the regulatory standards. But,
    doesn't leverage of this type, doesn't it rely on the bigger
    fool theory. When you're leveraged 50 to 1, doesn't that always
    assume there is somebody--there is a bigger fool that is going
    to continue to buy? Because if you have a normal default rate,
    if you have a 3 or 4 percent default rate and you're leveraged
    50-to-1, you're going to dip into capital.
        If you have a 10 percent leverage rate, you can experience
    a much higher default rate; isn't that right?
        So, you're assuming that this is almost an endless
    acceleration of prices to be able to leverage at that rate; is
    that not true?
        Mr. Mudd. Sir, I definitely think that you're onto the
    right issue, and the ability of the level of capital in either
    a company or a GSE to be responsive to the market conditions is
    important. That is now, as I understand, in the regulatory
    regime.
        And back to my earlier point, the fact that we now have
    more robust data that shows what capital should look like in
    various stress scenarios will inform--what were, after all,
    models designed by--won Nobel Prizes. So, I think that will be
    helpful in that regard.
        Mr. Yarmuth. Thank you.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        The gentlewoman from North Carolina, Ms. Foxx.
        Ms. Foxx. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I too want to
    congratulate you on your new position and tell you I look
    forward to working with you and our ranking member.
        There is so much to talk about here and so little time to
    do it, as my colleagues have said. But Mr. Yarmuth has just
    injected an important issue into what we were talking about, as
    have some of my other colleagues.
        I want to pose a question to you all that I'm not going to
    ask you to answer until after I make some more comments. But, I
    want to followup on what Mr. Yarmuth was saying about it seemed
    that, Mr. Mudd, you and others were always looking for things
    to get better because there is a quote here from the New York
    Times, ``Almost no one expected what was coming. It is not fair
    to blame us for not predicting the unthinkable.''
        Well, the question I want to ask you is, how in the world
    can shareholders and even citizens of this country when they
    have so much at stake and entities such as Fannie Mae and
    Freddie Mac, how do we and--and back up. And you have all said
    that the main thing that you would have liked to have done was
    to have stronger regulatory control. And I will come back to
    that in a minute.
        So, how do--how do boards of directors test people coming
    into their positions? Not just as CEOs, but CFOs and these
    other positions. But, you all have been CEOs, so, that's what
    we are talking about.
        How do we test for backbone? How do we test for ethics? How
    do we test for a sense of vision? And how do we test for people
    who are going to look at the full spectrum of issues, not just
    always looking for the sunny side of the street?
        But, we need people who understand how to deal with crisis.
    You're saying it is unfair to ask you to work in situations of
    crisis. What in the world were you getting paid millions of
    dollars to do, simply ride the gravy train and always be there
    when things were good? For heaven's sake, did you not have any
    sense that anything could ever go wrong under your watch and
    that you weren't responsible for that?
        You have exhibited no sense of accountability for your
    actions here. None. And that is disturbing to me and the
    American people. They expect us to be held accountable. And I
    want to say I appreciate the bipartisan nature of this hearing
    today. It has been the most bipartisan, I think, that we have
    had because we all agree there are problems.
        Administrations have created these problems too. This is
    not a Democrat/Republican issue. We have people--we have
    Members of Congress who are at fault too.
        I wasn't here when these things were happening, but I want
    to come up to a point my colleague, Mr. Shays, brought up. And
    again I'm going to leave time for you to answer your question.
    He made a comment that really triggered my concern about this,
    We got them to agree to go under the 1933 and 1934 act. You
    know, I'm just appalled as a Member of Congress that Members of
    Congress felt they had to get the agencies they regulate to
    agree to those regulations.
        What a situation we find ourselves in. Members of Congress
    don't have enough backbone themselves to do the kinds of
    regulations--and you're telling me, Mr. Raines, that the
    regulatory bill should have been enacted earlier and yet you
    fought it tooth and nail. But, now, in hindsight, you're
    willing to tell us it should have been regulated earlier,
    should have been more with risk management, but you fired the
    risk managers. So, you were afraid of being regulated because,
    again as Mr. Shays said, much of what has been found out that
    was wrong came about as the first real regulation.
        And, you know, it is not just your shareholders, it is not
    just the people you helped, but it is every American that is
    being affected by this because, as a result of your actions,
    home prices all over this country have gone down. You really
    have been irresponsible in what you have done, and the people
    who worked for you.
        And I have quote after quote after quote. And I think part
    of the problem boils down to the amount of PAC money that was
    coming in from you guys and how much you spent to make sure
    that Members of Congress would go easy on you in their
    regulations. And I hope that what has come out about that has
    raised the awareness of the American people about the
    connection between those moneys.
        And I love this committee. I got on it because it has the
    ability to investigate these kinds of things, where the other
    committees have vested interests in what's happening and are
    often swayed by those very lobbyists that you hired to stop the
    kind of hearings going on today and the regulations.
        But now with 20/20 hindsight, you want----
        Mr. Towns. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
        Ms. Foxx. We want the American public to know what your
    advice is on that.
        Mr. Towns. Very quickly because time has expired.
        Mr. Raines. Congresswoman, first of all with regard to
    accountability, I have three full pages in my written testimony
    on the issue of my accountability. And therefore, I would hope
    that you would recognize that I have not been silent on that.
    We simply are not allowed to testify to everything we have in
    our written statements.
        But, I went to great lengths to point out that from the
    beginning, when there was a question raised about Fannie Mae
    and its accounting, I said I hold myself accountable; if the
    SEC finds we have made errors, I will hold myself accountable
    and my board will.
        I retired early. I've had compensation clawed back. So, it
    is unfair to say that I have not accepted accountability for
    what happened when I was the CEO of the company.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Brendsel.
        Mr. Brendsel. Yeah. I certainly was accountable for what
    happened at Freddie Mac during my time----
        Mr. Towns. Is your mic on? Is your mic on?
        Mr. Brendsel. I'm sorry.
        I am. And I was held accountable for what happened to
    Freddie Mac during my tenure at the company, which ended in
    June 2003.
        I do believe that with regard to the subprime market and
    that--I think Freddie Mac behaved very responsibly under my
    tenure. My greatest accountability and ultimately why I left--I
    resigned from the company, of course--was a result of the
    financial restatement that we had to go through during 2003,
    which fortunately left the company with more capital than
    before, but nevertheless, it was still a restatement that the
    company should not have gone through.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. Do I expect sunny days? No. I went to Mexico when
    the peso was devalued. I went to Asia when the 1998 crisis hit.
    I went to Beirut when they were shooting there. People say that
    I like it too much when it is not a sunny day. So, I would
    disagree with that.
        I would say that this time through, reality exceeded my
    imagination. And with respect to the 1933 and the 1934 act, we
    were agreeing to reverse a registration that a prior Congress
    had provided an exemption from.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Syron.
        Mr. Syron. Thank you, sir. With respect to foresight and
    seeing things going forward, I was not as pessimistic as things
    eventually turned out. What I expected to happen was that
    housing prices would go down to being about flat in nominal
    terms and decline in real terms, but not catastrophically.
        Mr. Towns. Thanks very much.
        Mr. Braley.
        Mr. Braley. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Issa, thank you
    for holding this hearing. Mr. Chairman, there have been several
    references today during this hearing to a perfect storm. And I
    think it is important to remind everyone that in a perfect
    storm, the entire crew of the Andrea Gail perished. And the
    purpose of this hearing is because we've got paddles on the
    chest of two patients, and we're trying to determine how much
    voltage to apply to resuscitate them.
        Mr. Mudd, I'm going to start with you because you're one of
    the rare people that can say, My name is Mudd with a straight
    face. I want to start by asking you about an e-mail exchange
    you had with your chief risk officer, Enrico Dallavecchia.
        For 6 months beginning in March 2006, Fannie Mae
    implemented a new business initiative to buy subprime loans.
    And under this program, Fannie concluded one deal to buy $74
    million in subprime loans from a company called New Century,
    and it also began negotiating new deals. On August 16, 2006,
    the corporate risk management committee approved a final plan
    to purchase up to $5 billion in whole subprime loans in 2006.
        Two months later, on October 28, 2006, which ironically is
    the same day the Great Depression really began in earnest, Mr.
    Dallavecchia, your chief risk officer, sent an e-mail to you
    raising concerns about this huge increase in subprime
    purchases; and I'm going to ask them to put that e-mail up so
    that we can all take a look at it, and I want to read to you
    the portions that are in these callout boxes: ``Dan, I have a
    serious problem with the control process around subprime
    limits. Ramping up business much faster than we agreed upon
    less than 2 months ago is de facto preventing me to exercise my
    reserved authority to determine limits without damaging
    relationships with customers.''
        Mr. Mudd, Mr. Dallavecchia was saying you were ramping up
    too quickly on the subprime purchases and that this
    acceleration prevented him from determining appropriate risk
    limits. Isn't that true?
        Mr. Mudd. I'm sorry, sir. Could you repeat the question--
    part of your question?
        Mr. Braley. Yes. What he is saying here is that your
    company was ramping up too quickly on subprime purchases, and
    this acceleration was preventing him from determining
    appropriate risk limits; isn't that true?
        Mr. Mudd. I believe that's what he was saying in his note,
    yes, sir.
        Mr. Braley. And then, later in the e-mail, if we can go to
    the next slide, he says: ``We approved twice, in March and in
    June, to buy subprime loans without having completed the new
    business initiative.'' And then, in bold, ``This is a pattern
    emerging of inadequate regard for the control process.''
        It seems like in this portion of the memo, your risk
    officer believed that you were rushing into billions of dollars
    worth of subprime loan purchases without really knowing what
    you were doing. Isn't that what he is saying here?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes. And there is a part of the memo that is my
    response to him that is covered up by the box.
        Mr. Braley. We are going to get to that.
        Mr. Mudd. That furthers the conversation on the top.
        Mr. Braley. When he sent this e-mail to you, did you agree
    with this assessment?
        Mr. Mudd. That is why I wrote above it, ``It is a serious
    matter, and if the facts are supportive, you and I will come
    down hard.'' That's what it says above that.
        So, he came and saw me. We went through the facts. We got
    the folks at the table, we had the discussion, and we went back
    to address those concerns. That was exactly the process, sir.
        Mr. Braley. Right. So let's go to that portion of the memo
    that you replied, and your reply was dated on Sunday, October
    29th, at 12:42 p.m. As you indicated, you said, ``This is a
    serious matter;'' so you agreed with his assessment that it was
    a serious matter, correct?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes.
        Mr. Braley. And then you said if the facts are supportive,
    we will come down hard. Were the facts supportive?
        Mr. Mudd. As often happens in these types of situations,
    the facts were partially supportive. I would say in this case
    maybe even mostly supportive.
        Mr. Braley. So, did you come down hard?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes, we did.
        Mr. Braley. What did you do?
        Mr. Mudd. We called all of the people that were involved in
    the process into the room, had a discussion, had a meeting,
    laid out the--if I can just rewind for 1 second.
        The role of an independent chief risk officer at Fannie Mae
    and most financial institutions was a relatively new role. So,
    the rules of the road were kind of being written in real time,
    and what I wanted to do was to make it very clear that the CRO
    not only reported to me but also reported to the board. I
    wanted to make it very clear in this process of coming down
    hard that person was my right hand on risk, that person needed
    to be part of the process, that person needed to be heard; and
    if that person needed to discuss a report independently to the
    board, he or she had the ability to do so.
        Mr. Braley. Well, Mr. Mudd, I think the American taxpayers
    are the ultimate jury on whether you came down hard, and I
    think the record indicates you didn't come down hard. Instead,
    you continued the acceleration. And let me show you a
    presentation made to the credit risk committee less than 3
    months later on January 17, 2007.
        Can we have that, please?
        Well, in that presentation, management proposed expanding
    the subprime business unit in 2007, purchasing $11 billion more
    in subprime loans and eliminating restrictions on the volume of
    mortgages you could purchase with lower borrower scores and
    unverified incomes. So, in effect, you were increasing your
    levels of risk rather than moderating them as your chief risk
    officer had recommended; and it looks to me, and I think it
    looks to a lot of taxpayers, like you were going in exactly the
    opposite direction of your risk officer's recommendations.
        I yield back the balance of my time.
        Mr. Mudd. Sir, if I may. His memo--I have a serious problem
    with the control process around the subprime limit. So, he
    wasn't expressing a problem with subprime as a broad issue, as
    characterized. He was expressing a concern around the control
    processes--the sign-offs, the coding, the filing, and so forth.
    And that control process was the subject of this discussion and
    of the remediation. And that is a separate issue than an
    entire, broader debate that we had in the company and with the
    board and with the regulator and elsewhere about the subprime
    market in general.
        So, I would just recommend it is important to keep the two
    issues somewhat separate.
        Mr. Braley. I understand that. But, the whole purpose of
    having control processes in place in a company like yours is to
    make sure you're making rational business decisions based upon
    the best information available and that you are following a
    rational process to make those decisions. So, if the control
    processes are not in proper working order, it prevents you from
    following a rational decisionmaking model, doesn't it?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes. And that's why it was important to fix them.
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. McHenry from North Carolina.
        Mr. McHenry. I like the new chairman, and congratulations
    to you. I look forward to working with you. We'll start with a
    simple yes-or-no question.
        Ms. Foxx. Good luck.
        Mr. McHenry. Good luck, I hear.
        OK, in order to fulfill your affordable housing goal,
    instituted and given to you by Congress, did you feel in order
    to fulfill that affordable housing goal, did you feel pressure
    from Congress to do riskier mortgages, perhaps more borderline
    mortgages?
        We will start with Mr. Raines, and we'll go right down the
    list. Yes or no?
        Mr. Raines. I did not feel pressure from Congress because--
    --
        Mr. McHenry. So no? I'm asking--I only have 5 minutes.
        Mr. Raines. No.
        Mr. McHenry. You have had a long day, so I'm trying to----
        Mr. Raines. No.
        Mr. McHenry. No. Interesting.
        Mr. Brendsel. No.
        Mr. McHenry. No.
        Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. No, because if the goals went up, the goals came
    from HUD, and meeting those HUD goals created pressure.
        Mr. McHenry. Mr. Syron.
        Mr. Syron. As the goals went up and the goals were
    specified by HUD, you inevitably, to make more progress, had to
    take more risk.
        Mr. McHenry. So, in order to make more progress with your
    affordable housing goal, you had to make riskier mortgages?
        Mr. Syron. Buy riskier mortgages.
        Mr. McHenry. Buy riskier mortgages. I think it is
    interesting Mr. Syron gave something more akin to what I was
    accustomed to as a member of the Financial Services Committee.
    I have seen some of you before, and I don't know if you just
    refuse to listen to what happened in those hearings, but there
    was massive pressure from Members of Congress on your
    institutions to provide more affordable housing and, therefore,
    riskier mortgages.
        Now, I'm not calling them riskier. Your risk officers
    called them riskier. And in Freddie Mac's case, Mr. Andrukonis
    wrote a memo in 2004--we can call that up--to push for ``more
    affordable business.'' I guess that is your lingo for more
    affordable housing; and ``increased share'' means more
    borderline and unprofitable business will come in. ``The best
    credit enhancement is a profit margin, and ours is likely to be
    squeezed in response to these market pressures.''
        So, I think--it is interesting to me that in some respects
    and by your newspaper accounts, you acknowledge that there was
    pressure on you. And obviously pressure from Congress in terms
    of congressional efforts on HUD to raise those standards, but
    also on you all directly.
        And I think it is pretty bizarre--I mean, the chairman of
    my committee, ``financial services,'' Barney Frank, said, ``I'm
    worried, quite frankly; there is tension here.'' This is from
    2003. ``The more people in my judgment exaggerate a threat of
    safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the
    possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury which I
    do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally
    sound financially and we are seeing some of the disastrous
    scenarios. Congresswoman Waters, who I serve with on Financial
    Services, said, `If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' ''
        We're still paying the price for that. But, my point is,
    you did have pressure to meet your affordable housing goal. And
    that was done through Members of Congress; it was done through
    HUD; and that was conflicted with your delivery for your
    investors to produce profit. That's what your risk officer
    said.
        Do you all disagree? Mr. Raines.
        Mr. Raines. I disagree. In my time that I was there, I did
    not feel pressured from the Congress to do riskier loans to
    meet housing goals. Our housing goals were ratcheted up
    administratively by HUD. Congress gave guidelines that I
    thought were quite reasonable to HUD. HUD, by the time I had
    left, was proposing to push those guidelines to a level to
    force the companies to begin to entertain loans that they
    otherwise wouldn't have entertained. So it really was more from
    a regulatory standpoint than Congress.
        Mr. McHenry. And who funds HUD? Congress.
        Let me just tell you--I hate to reference this, and Mr.
    Raines knows from his political background, but this is a
    political city. There was pressure from Congress.
        Mr. Raines. However, Congressman, at that time, just to be
    fair, Congress was in the hands of the Republicans. So I don't
    think that the Republicans were intending to force HUD to
    rachet up our goals to an unreasonable level.
        Mr. McHenry. Reading from your quote in the Washington Post
    yesterday, you want to make this a partisan situation.
        Mr. Raines. Congressman, that is just not correct. I
    actually want it not to be a partisan situation.
        Mr. McHenry. That's generous of you.
        So, I read in the Washington Post from yesterday, that same
    article I just referenced, what they say is, ``People familiar
    with the matter said Freddie was being pushed by advocacy
    groups to come up with new loan products to offer to low-income
    and minority borrowers.'' Is that true?
        Mr. Towns. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Mr. Syron. By advocacy groups, yes, sir.
        Mr. McHenry. Yes. And those same advocacy groups are
    closely aligned with some Members of Congress as well, and they
    are voices for that advocacy groups as well.
        Mr. Syron. I would be speculating to get into----
        Mr. McHenry. Well, I will tell you, yes, they are. Thank
    you.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Sarbanes from Maryland.
        I'm sorry. The gentlewoman from Washington returned.
        Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. You don't
    want to start off making mistakes, do you?
        Mr. Towns. That's exactly right. No doubt about it. I want
    to start this thing off right.
        Ms. Norton. Gentlemen, I have to confess my major concerns
    are going forward because the GSEs have been so important for
    low- and moderate-income housing in the United States for
    decades. Indeed, after we finally figure out how to get to the
    bottom of housing crisis, which is a subject of extreme
    frustration I must tell you here, I think the most important
    decision that we could make on housing has to do with the GSEs.
        I'm very concerned about the ad hoc problem solving that is
    going on with respect to this crisis. Something pops up,
    somebody leaps on it; and I certainly hope somebody is working
    on this one right now.
        You have a twin identity that absolutely fascinates me. On
    the one hand, you have a very important--indeed, the most
    important--public mission in housing, to assist low- and
    moderate-income families. On the other hand, you're like every
    corporation because you have shareholders.
        Mr. Paulson, when Fannie Mae went into conservatorship, was
    very plain about what he thought; and I want to quote from him.
    He said there was a ``consensus that the GSEs, hold a systemic
    risk.'' And he went on to say, ``Government support needs to be
    either explicit or nonexistent, and structured to resolve the
    conflict between public and private purposes.''
        I would like to ask each of you whether you agree with
    Secretary Paulson. Do you think that the GSEs should be
    returned to the entities they were before? Do you think they
    should be part of government? Do you think they should be
    privatized?
        And in giving your answer, I would like to know if you
    believe that they should be--GSEs, whether you would also make
    them exempt from local and State taxes, give them a line at the
    Treasury, exemption from at least certain kinds of regulations,
    which of course give them an advantage when competing in the
    private market.
        Why don't I start with you, Mr. Raines, because I noticed
    in your testimony that you did not apparently see inherent
    problems, and you say you don't think we can find a better
    model. Could you explain your view or is that still your view?
        Mr. Raines. Well, I can explain it, I think, very quickly.
        The systemic risk to the system comes from any very large
    financial institutions that are highly leveraged, whether they
    are called GSEs or they are called insurance companies or they
    are called banks. Indeed, we saw in the current crisis that the
    most troubled entities and the ones that had the most extensive
    impact on the financial system weren't GSEs. The biggest one is
    an insurance company that had never been identified as a
    systemic risk.
        Second, with regard to making the government support either
    explicit or nonexistent, I can agree with that. I think it can
    be explicit and not--I don't think it would be possible to go
    back to the implicit support that was there before. And I think
    the market should be told what the support is; and that should
    be it, and the investors should take the risk.
        On the last point on resolving the conflict between public
    and private purposes, I think that is laudable, but impossible.
    And an example I would give you is a defense contractor. A
    defense contractor is only there to solve for a public purpose.
    They only sell to the government. They are there for national
    defense. That product is not really useful anywhere else in the
    economy.
        But, they are also for-profit companies. They are there to
    advance the interest of their shareholders.
        Ms. Norton. Would people invest in such a company?
        Mr. Raines. I think people invest currently in utility;
    they invest currently in defense contractors, and they invest
    in banks that have the same conflict within themselves.
        Ms. Norton. So, you think perhaps we should treat Fannie
    Mae and Freddie Mac more like a utility then?
        Mr. Raines. I think treating them more like a utility may
    be politically much more comfortable than treating them in the
    current form.
        Ms. Norton. Let me go on to Mr. Mudd, who has indicated
    that Freddie and Fannie are in a ``no-man's land.'' And you in
    your testimony, you advocate to make them either fully public
    or fully private. So, which should they be? And why?
        Mr. Mudd. The advocacy, Congresswoman, is to make it clear
    for a long time throughout----
        Ms. Norton. You don't care which it is, sir?
        Mr. Mudd. I think at this point--I know a little bit more
    intimately the structure of the company, and there are
    different components of the company. One component, the
    mortgage portfolio is a liquidity provider fundamentally, the
    guaranty business is fundamentally a securitizer.
        It seems clear to me now in the history of the past 6 or 8
    months, that if there is a real crisis in the country, the
    liquidity provider is going to be the government. So, that
    would give rise to a question of whether you want a private
    company to be a liquidity provider or whether that becomes a
    function of the government.
        The other side of the business, the guaranty business that
    does work with lenders, provide services, does so at a fee
    might have another--might have another treatment.
        So, I don't think the same answer needs to be true for all
    components of the company if you're going to move it out of
    what you aptly described as ``no-man's land.''
        Ms. Norton. I would like to know if the other two gentlemen
    believe that an entirely private company could be trusted to
    provide the same protection to the consumer, particularly the
    consumers that the GSEs were specifically directed to help.
        Mr. Syron. Well, ma'am, Congresswoman, I don't think that--
    excuse me, gentlemen--I don't think a purely private company
    could generate long-term fixed-rate mortgages that are
    prepayable just because no other country, major country, has
    one.
        I think, as some of my colleagues have said, the most
    important thing is getting a more precise definition, whether
    it is a defense company which operates on some sort of cost-
    plus, a utility with a specified rate of return, there needs to
    be less sort of swimming around and more definition of what the
    shareholders can expect.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Brendsel, and then----
        Mr. Brendsel. I think one only has to look at the mortgage
    market of today and the mortgage market of the past two or
    three decades. And you can see where it is that part of the
    market is served by the purely private market. It doesn't work
    as well. It is more unstable, and you don't have the types of
    mortgage products that are consumer friendly.
        I also happen to be of the--maybe the view in the minority.
    I don't see a fundamental conflict between the public purpose
    for which Freddie Mac is chartered, and was chartered, and its
    shareholder ownership. After all, we are chartered to bring
    stability and liquidity and availability of mortgage credit to
    low- and moderate- and middle-income families and to use
    private capital to do so. It is that one mission, unique
    mission.
        Ms. Norton. What about the shareholder mission?
        Mr. Brendsel. Well, in order for--if the shareholders are
    served, they are only served by serving that mission of
    bringing mortgage credit to American homeowners at a profitable
    rate, but at a rate where it is the result in sound loans.
        Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        Mr. Garrett from New Jersey.
        Mr. Garrett. I thank the chairman, and I thank the ranking
    member for the opportunity. I normally serve on the Financial
    Services Committee; so I appreciate this chance to be here for
    a few minutes--actually, for several hours now--because this
    has been a topic of most importance to me ever since I have
    been here, for the last 6 years.
        I appreciate your testimony and also some of the questions.
    One point is, I appreciate the fact also that the panel is made
    up of members who are here with both organizations during
    different years. And so, therefore, it is probably unfair to
    use a broad-brush approach on any of the questions or some of
    the allegations that were made because you were in different
    spots.
        To the point of who is responsible, which is a lot of the
    questioning, and the committee is evidencing the fact that we
    don't feel we don't get that back from the panel, let me just
    also say the flip side of that on this issue just for 30
    seconds. And that is this: Just as the panel had the
    opportunity to address a number of the questions or issues
    during their tenure in office and some of the questions I will
    raise as well, let it not be forgotten that Congress also had
    the opportunity for the 6 years that I served, and prior to
    that as well, to address some of these issues--the systemic
    risk issues, the operation issues, the issues as far as where
    you were investing, and the size of portfolio and what have
    you, and that was not done.
        So, I would ask each Member, who was raising those
    questions as who was responsible to look in their mirror on
    this panel to see, how did they vote both in committee and on
    the floor when the opportunity came for the House and the
    Senate to rein in, create new regulations for the GSEs in the
    past. So, I think there is an adequate opportunity to see
    responsibility both in the panel and this committee as well.
        Going to the GSEs, you make money in two different manners.
    One, of course, is by buying up securities, packaging
    mortgages, and then selling them. The second way, of course, is
    by taking these mortgages and putting them into your portfolio.
        That second way, in my understanding, is eight times more
    lucrative or profitable than the selling of the securities. The
    number in here that I have seen is, you had reached a high in
    2003 of $1.5 trillion worth of securities in your held
    portfolio, and 2008 went down to $1.4 trillion.
        And interestingly enough on these numbers, in 2005 to 2007,
    this is what--the type of securities you were putting in there:
    97 percent were interest-only securities; 85--or mortgages--85
    percent were Alt-A; 72 percent were negative amortization
    mortgages; 61 or 62 percent were with FICAs under 620.
        Obviously, these are, A, the more risky loans that were
    going on during that time; and in general, during the entire
    period of time for everyone when you were expanding your
    portfolio, that was more profitable on the one hand, but
    certainly riskier on the other hand.
        The issues have already been raised as far as leveraged
    ratio on the capital levels, and this committee criticized
    Lehman for a 31 ratio, and here you're leveraged at a 75-to-1
    ratio.
        One of the members of the panel said to all of these
    points--in general, and not specifically on one--that ``we were
    doing the same as our competitors.'' So, one of my first
    questions will be--and I'll get to this--allow you to answer in
    a second. Is it appropriate for a GSE, which has the backing
    implicitly now, implied at the time of the government, to
    simply be mirroring what the private sector is doing; or were
    you--should have been to a higher standard in each of these
    areas--your risk model, your capital model, what you were
    putting in the securities as well? And that will be the first
    question I would throw out to you.
        Second, to the regulation aspect, but Ms. Foxx and Mr.
    McHenry raised this point very well. Mr. Raines, you were
    saying that you were looking for additional regulation. And I
    think you made the comment in your testimony--you didn't go in
    full detail, but I read your full testimony--OFHEO was not
    restraining credit risks, but they were limited to balance
    sheet and interest rates risk.
        That may be, but I can tell you that certain members of the
    Financial Services Committee were looking at all of those
    areas. And you had Secretary Snow come in before the committee
    and testify. You had Alan Greenspan come in and testify on
    these points. You had Richard Baker when he was here
    testifying--not testifying, but raising these points. There was
    a focus, at least for the 6 years when I was in Congress, to
    try to do these things.
        While perhaps you did come before the committee and say
    that we needed regulation in the House, we know for a fact that
    the House regulations were a lot softer, a lot easier than the
    regulations that were being proposed in the Senate. And what
    the GSEs did effectively through the lobbying mechanisms and
    otherwise was to kill effectively during the time the
    Republicans were in charge of those efforts in the Senate; and
    what we have ended up with now is regulation, albeit late and
    obviously way too late, but much softer regulations than should
    have been done in the past.
        And finally, I guess on that point--since my time is just
    about out--to the point, you may have made the suggestion, Mr.
    Raines, that the problem was not a credit problem per se in the
    portfolios and the mortgage-backed securities. But, really
    wasn't it a problem--and this is when the accounting
    irregularities came up and what have you--wasn't the problem
    underlined by the fact that because of the size of the
    portfolio and having to deal with interest-rate risks that you
    had to be getting involved with derivatives and other
    mechanisms in order to hedge against that; and that effectively
    led to some of the problems that we dealt with later on?
        So, I guess there are three questions there, two for Mr.
    Raines and the rest for the panel.
        Mr. Towns. Let me say to the gentleman, I know you waited 2
    hours, but your time has expired.
        Mr. Garrett. Thank you again for the opportunity, though.
        Mr. Raines. I believe there were two questions that were
    directed to me, one of them about regulation and Fannie Mae's
    activities with regard to legislation and the other related to
    derivatives; is that correct?
        Mr. Garrett. Yes.
        Mr. Raines. With regard to Fannie Mae and legislation, it
    was always my desire--and I worked very hard, but
    unsuccessfully--to try to get legislation passed because I
    believe that as legislation was passed, then all of the
    political swirl around Fannie Mae would subside for at least
    some period of time. And I was an advocate, and I think if you
    talk to the chairman of the committee, the relevant committee,
    even Mr. Baker would indicate that I wanted legislation.
        Did we agree on all of the provisions? No. But, the
    provisions we disagreed on did not relate to regulation; they
    related to our mission. There were efforts to try to try to
    constrain our mission. I opposed those. But, where it came to a
    world-class regulator as defined by Congressman Kanjorski and
    who pushed this over and over again, I was in favor of that.
        I'm still in favor of it. And I'm still opposed to
    constraining the mission of the GSEs. So I think there has been
    a consistency across that time.
        In terms of the derivatives, as you accurately point out,
    Fannie Mae used derivatives in order to enable to fund itself,
    including its own balance sheet portfolio. And the fact that
    Fannie Mae had to do a restatement is something that I have
    stated over and over again that I'm not only sorry for, but I
    hold myself accountable that we did not get it right, even
    though I was not involved in the accounting.
        I would point out, however, this is not a problem that was
    unique to Fannie Mae. I think that upwards of 200 companies had
    to have restatements around derivatives in that time period.
    Some of them had to do it twice before they could do it
    properly, according to the SEC. So, this difficulty of applying
    the FAS 133 standard was not unique to Fannie Mae, but it was
    widespread amongst financial firms during that era.
        Mr. Brendsel. With regard to derivatives, we used
    derivatives at Freddie Mac to reduce risk, to manage interest
    rate risk, and we didn't use it to manage credit risk or the
    risk of default on subprime mortgages, which I have already
    testified to reduce risk, to reduce interest rate risk. But,
    that doesn't have anything to do really with the losses that
    are being taken on credit risks associated with subprime
    mortgages.
        Mr. Mudd. I guess for the purpose of time, I would just
    address the risk question and the standards question. And I
    think in the context of the Alt-A book, the ultimate measure
    there is the performance; and the performance of the Alt-A
    loans that Fannie Mae guaranteed has been a factor to--better
    than the market. The FICAs were higher, the credit scores were
    higher, the loan-to-values were higher. The question was, was
    it ultimately good enough that it matched or exceeded the
    performance of the other 85 percent of the book, which is the
    old standard fixed rate mortgage. No. That is a reflection of
    the change in the marketplace.
        Was there a role for the companies in terms of standard
    setting? Yes, Congressman, I think that expressly defines what
    we were talking about earlier about relevance. You can't set
    any standards whatsoever if you're irrelevant to the market
    because you're offering products that nobody wants.
        Mr. Syron. Mr. Congressman, I will try to quickly answer
    two of the questions.
        One, should we have the same capital standards--not ``we''
    anymore--but should there be the same capital standards? And I
    think that depends on the degree of the guarantee. I have
    sympathy for your argument that if there is an explicit
    guarantee for the GSEs in not--for the competing financial
    institutions, then maybe there is an argument for higher
    capital to protect the public. I think the reverse situation
    may actually apply now.
        And second is, in terms of the willingness to take risks in
    where things were. Actually, if you look at the latest Mortgage
    Bankers Association figures on delinquencies, they show for the
    country as a--excuse me, for the industry as a whole--4.9
    percent and for Freddie Mac 0.8 percent. So, in terms of--far
    from perfect, but the level of delinquencies, about six times
    greater for the industry than for Freddie Mac.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much. The gentleman from
    Maryland, Mr. Sarbanes.
        Mr. Sarbanes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Thank you all. You have demonstrated extraordinary stamina
    here today. We have been here for 4 hours, one of the longest
    panels we have had over the past couple years, but I think it
    reflects the level of interest there is on the part of the
    committee.
        I wanted to ask if you, and anyone can take a shot at this,
    talk about the distinction--I am going to put this into lay
    person's terms--the distinction between a good risky loan and a
    bad risky loan. Because you talked about how there was pressure
    from HUD, let's say, to make sure that affordable housing
    targets were being met and so forth. But, certainly that wasn't
    an instruction to go find or buy or become entangled with the
    kinds of loans where all manner of conventional underwriting
    standards have been abandoned.
        So, I am curious to know how you would describe what was
    presented to you. Were you looking into a stew of good risky
    loans and bad risky loans? If we want to suggest that all of
    the ones that would take you into the more affordable housing
    arena would be characterized as risky, certainly your
    obligation to continue to differentiate between the ones that
    were extra risky or bad versus the ones that were good, that
    obligation should never have been surrendered.
        So, anybody can speak to that if they'd like.
        We can start with you, Mr. Raines.
        Mr. Raines. Congressman, I like your division between good
    risky loans and bad risky loans because all loans are risky.
    They all have some level of risk to them, and it is important
    to be able to measure that risk and to manage it.
        When seeking to push the envelope of those who have access
    to home ownership, and I think this is an important
    distinction, we tried very hard to come up with loan products
    that we thought helped to make housing affordable and available
    without layering in so many things that the risk was
    unacceptable.
        So, for example, if someone had good credit and they had a
    good steady income, but they didn't have much in the way of
    savings, we would have a low down payment product. If someone
    had good credit but--had marginal credit, but had substantial
    savings, we might say we will take on that marginal credit
    because they have offset it by having substantial savings that
    they could put into a down payment. So, it is the layering of
    these factors.
        When you put together negative amortization, interest-only,
    no documentation, low down payment, bad credit, that layering
    on gets you into bad risky loans. Those are loans that almost
    no one knows how they are going to perform, but you can assume
    it will be pretty bad.
        So, trying to figure out what that line is, when do you
    cross a line between acceptable risk that is advancing
    affordable housing and unacceptable risk that is putting
    families at severe risk to their futures? That is the art. No
    one can tell you exactly where that line is. But, the policies
    that we tried to follow when I was leading the company was,
    keep experimenting. Do small experiments. None that could cause
    you a lot of harm if they go bad, but keep trying. Try this,
    try that. If it doesn't work, stop. If it does work, then
    double down, and do more. And----
        Mr. Sarbanes. Let me go to your tenure, because Fannie Mae
    was purchasing more of these loans that appear to have departed
    from the conventional underwriting standards. Is that because
    you couldn't distinguish between a less risky loan? Or what was
    happening?
        Mr. Mudd. What happened was that the market migrated to a
    wide array of loans with a wide array of features that Mr.
    Raines pointed out was driven by a multiplicity of factors that
    we could go into. But, they certainly included the rising cost
    of a home. They certainly included the technology ability from
    lenders and servicers to offer more choices and more
    complicated products to individuals.
        So, I agree with what he said, that a number of features
    would take a risky loan and turn it into a bad, risky loan. And
    those would go to features that could put an unwary borrower
    into a difficult situation. Negative amortization was
    mentioned, prepayment penalties could be mentioned, required
    insurance, those types of things. But, to me, just stepping
    back for 1 second from a policy perspective, one of the
    starting points might ought to be disclosure, where all of us,
    when we get a mortgage, see a front page that says here's your
    rate, here's the maximum rate you might ever pay, here's your
    monthly payment, here's the maximum monthly payment you might
    ever pay, and that there be kind of a moment of truth between
    the originator and the borrower to make sure they understand.
        Mr. Sarbanes. This is really a question I have had in all
    these hearings because it is not the case--if I am listening as
    a member of the public, it has never been the case in these
    hearings that anyone has suggested that there weren't warnings,
    and that is why all this stuff happened. It's always been the
    case that we have plenty of testimony that there were warnings,
    but they were not heeded. And I am not going to ask you to
    comment on why you didn't heed warnings within your own
    companies, within your own organizations. I am going to ask you
    this:
        What does one do as a corporation--in other words, because
    it was in your interest not to get in. I mean, we talk about
    the effect on the public. But, obviously you would have
    preferred that this didn't happen to Fannie Mae and Freddie
    Mac, and so would all these other companies that are going down
    the tank. What do you do inside an organization to make sure
    that the people that are raising the warnings can somehow
    impact the decisions that are being made? Because it seems, if
    I was a risk analyst from this period of time, I would be going
    through an existential crisis right now. Like what purpose are
    they serving? How do you protect their ability to sound the
    alarm and give it the kind of credence that might have changed
    the course of all of this? So, I will give it to anybody who
    wants to answer.
        Mr. Mudd. My answer would be that you have to create a
    culture that enables those people to get their voice heard. In
    a corporation, it doesn't mean that somebody always gets their
    way, but just like I suppose, in Congress, a legislative
    assistant doesn't get to decide what the Member does. The chief
    risk officer doesn't always get to decide what the CEO does.
    But, you have to make sure that all those voices are a part of
    the debate and that people have a view, no matter what their
    level or their rank or their position or their tenure in the
    company, have the ability to get their voice heard, get it
    considered, be respected. And sometimes, they are right;
    sometimes, they are wrong. Sometimes, you are right; sometimes,
    you are wrong. But, you have to have that culture where you
    don't get a reinforcement of the wrong decisions.
        That would be my experience, Congressman.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        The gentlewoman from California, Ms. Speier.
        Ms. Speier. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
        And thank you to the members of our panel. Let me just ask
    a couple of really brief questions and then get to the core
    question I want to ask.
        Are any of you now employed by the financial services
    industry?
        Mr. Syron. No.
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Mr. Brendsel. No.
        Mr. Raines. No.
        Ms. Speier. And in each of your cases, was your
    compensation in any way, whether it was bonus or stock options
    or salary, linked to the volume that was generated by the
    company?
        Mr. Syron. We had a balance scorecard, and I've been
    racking my mind going through here, whether share was any part
    of that. So, indirectly, there may have been, but I don't
    directly recall.
        Ms. Speier. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. We had a parallel process where there were a
    number of different objectives that needed to occur, and one of
    those was certainly revenues, which would tie to your question.
        Ms. Speier. So, there was a linkage?
        Mr. Mudd. Revenues were a component of the overall
    consideration for bonuses particularly. Yes.
        Ms. Speier. Mr. Brendsel.
        Mr. Brendsel. First of all, my compensation was set by the
    board of directors and evaluated annually in my bonuses, and so
    forth, and they considered many factors: certainly, the
    profitability of the company, but also the capitalization, the
    safety, soundness, the risk profile, whether or not there were
    too many mortgage delinquencies or defaults. And so I always
    felt that my compensation was not at all linked to volume
    generated.
        Ms. Speier. Mr. Raines.
        Mr. Raines. As I testified before, I don't believe that
    volume has played a role in the formula when I was there, but
    profitability did. And sometimes market share vis-a-vis Freddie
    Mac did. But, volume by itself was not a factor, as I recall.
        Ms. Speier. Thank you.
        Mr. Mudd, I am referring now to an October 5, 2008, New
    York Times article that focused on an exchange between you and
    Mr. Mozilo, formerly the head of Countrywide. And the article
    quotes Mr. Mozilo as telling you, ``you are becoming
    irrelevant. You need us more than we need you, and if you don't
    take these loans, you will find you can lose much more.''
        In fact, I think you flew to California to have that
    conversation with him.
        Can you please describe for the record the exchange you had
    with Mr. Mozilo?
        Mr. Mudd. I can't because I don't remember that exchange at
    all. I did look back through my records in preparation for the
    hearing. And I had a number of meetings with Countrywide. I had
    a number of meetings with Mozilo, as I did with all of our key
    customers. As it was described in the paper, that certainly
    would have been a memorable meeting, but it doesn't trigger my
    memory.
        Certainly, with him as well as with other customers, there
    was a back and forth in terms of what was our eligibility, what
    was our pricing, what was our credit standard, what was the
    value of our guarantee, what was our pricing versus Freddie
    Mac, etc. But, particular conversation.
        Ms. Speier. You don't recall him offering you a breath mint
    at the end?
        Mr. Mudd. No.
        Ms. Speier. There was a presentation from June 2005 titled,
    ``Facing Strategic Crossroads.'' The presentation discusses how
    Fannie is losing market share to Wall Street. The slide is on
    page 27 and says, Primary market originations of products
    outside Fannie Mae's traditional risk appetite are on the rise.
        Then, the slide on page 32 says, This trend is increasingly
    costing us with our largest customer.
        Now, as the slide shows, your largest customer was
    Countrywide. Isn't that right?
        Mr. Mudd. Yes.
        Ms. Speier. Did you lower your standards to accommodate the
    riskier loans from Countrywide?
        Mr. Mudd. No, we established a set of standards. We had a
    debate that I have described during the course of the hearing
    that said the core of Fannie Mae business with all of its very
    attributes was shrinking, and our market share on that note had
    gone I think from 40 percent to about 20 percent. Meanwhile,
    the market for alternative products had gone from about 10
    percent up to 40 percent.
        So, it was clear that there had been a change in the
    marketplace; that if our lenders, our seller servicers, and
    others wanted to go around us to some different form of
    securitization, which typically was a rating agency sizing, set
    up and distributed through Wall Street; they had that
    alternative. And the continuation of market share trend that
    goes 40/20 is obviously quite low. So, we made a prudent effort
    to figure out what we could do to recapture that business. And
    obviously, with Countrywide as one of the largest originators,
    they were part of that overall effort, as were other major
    financial institutions.
        Ms. Speier. In the documents the committee has received, it
    appears that the Alt-A mortgages that Fannie Mae bought between
    2005 and 2007 in large measure from Countrywide had riskier
    terms and higher delinquency rates, and they contributed to
    more than 40 percent of Fannie's credit losses last quarter.
        So, my time is up, but I think it is interesting that, in
    the end, you did expand your portfolio of Countrywide loans,
    and it has in this last quarter created quite a bit of
    heartburn within Fannie Mae.
        Mr. Mudd. I think the Alt-A loans--just to be clear, I
    think that is a representation of Alt-A losses as a total
    percentage of the book rather than Countrywide, although
    Countrywide would probably be a component of that total number.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        Ms. Foxx. Mr. Chairman, I want to ask your indulgence on
    something. You were able to give Mr. Shays 1 extra minute; he
    is leaving the committee. Mr. Sali is about to leave us also,
    and he had one very, very important point he would like to make
    that has not been made today. It is not a repeat of anything.
    And I am wondering if you would indulge us with 1 more minute.
        Mr. Towns. I would be delighted to do so, especially being
    he is leaving.
        Mr. Sali. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        It's the last time I will bother you. This would be for Mr.
    Syron, I guess. And I believe you should have a document that
    looks like this in front of you. And I assume you understand
    what that Credit Policy and Portfolio Department Report deals
    with for Freddie Mac.
        I am looking on that second page there under priority No.
    5, and if you go over to the right side of the page, there are
    four bullets there. And the third one talks about additional
    affordable type programs being considered. And in that third
    line, it talks about programs apparently for illegal
    immigrants. And I am wondering, if you could describe what that
    proposed program was about? Why would a government-sponsored
    enterprise, one, engage in something like that? Was it
    implemented in any way? So, how many loans were given? How many
    defaulted? Those kinds of things, can you give me an idea of
    what that program was about?
        Mr. Syron. You know, I am seeing this for the first time in
    some substantial period of time. And, unfortunately, I don't
    remember.
        Mr. Towns. Without objection, so ordered.
        Let me thank all the witnesses of course for your
    testimony. We appreciate the time that you've shared with us
    today. And of course, we look forward to continuing to work
    with you because, as you know, there are a lot of things here
    that need to be fixed and I think we all agree on that. So,
    thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much for
    your testimony.
        We will take a 5-minute recess before going into our second
    panel. And then, of course, after that, we will swear them in
    and receive their testimony. So, a 5-minute recess.
        [Recess.]
        Mr. Towns. The hearing will come to order.
        I want to point out that there is a longstanding tradition
    here in this committee that we swear all of our witnesses in.
    So, please rise, raise your right hands.
        [Witnesses sworn.]
        Mr. Towns. Please let the record reflect that all the
    witnesses answered in the affirmative.
        We are delighted to have with us Mr. Charles Calomiris. Mr.
    Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman professor of financial
    institutions at Columbia Business School. And Professor
    Calomiris co-directs the project on financial deregulation at
    the American Enterprise Institute and is the Arthur Burns
    Scholar in international economics at AEI.
        Mr. Arnold Kling is a former senior economist at Freddie
    Mac from 1986 to 1997. He also served as an economist at the
    Federal Reserve Board. He is currently an adjunct scholar at
    the Cato Institute.
        Welcome.
        Mr. Pinto served as the former chief credit officer of
    Fannie Mae from 1987 until 1989. He also was the head of
    marketing and product management at Fannie Mae for 3 years.
    Since leaving the company in 1989, he has worked as a real
    estate financial services consultant.
        Welcome.
        Mr. Thomas Stanton. Mr. Stanton is a fellow of the Center
    for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins
    University. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of
    Public Administration.
        Welcome to the committee.
        And we will begin with you, Mr.--why don't we just go right
    down the line.
        Mr. Pinto, right down the line.

    STATEMENTS OF EDWARD PINTO, FORMER CHIEF CREDIT OFFICER, FANNIE
      MAE, AND REAL ESTATE FINANCIAL SERVICES CONSULTANT; CHARLES
      CALOMIRIS, ARTHUR BURNS SCHOLAR IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS,
     AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE; ARNOLD KLING, ADJUNCT SCHOLAR,
      CATO INSTITUTE; AND THOMAS STANTON, FELLOW, CENTER FOR THE
        STUDY OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

                       STATEMENT OF EDWARD PINTO

        Mr. Pinto. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to
    speak today.
        You have already noted my credentials; so, I won't repeat
    them. I will only add that, prior to my starting at Fannie Mae
    in 1984, I had 10 years experience in affordable housing. I
    left the company in 1989, and since then, I have provided
    financial service consulting services, and I followed GSEs
    closely.
        What I found in my study that I have done privately is that
    there is surprisingly little consistent information available
    about the size of the subprime market and the contribution that
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made to its growth. My testimony
    today will bring together all the available information that I
    found through my research and will contain information that has
    not, to my knowledge, been published elsewhere.
        In my prepared testimony, I show that there are a total of
    25 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding in the United
    States, with an unpaid principal balance of $4.5 trillion.
    These 25 million default-prone loans constitute 44 percent of
    all mortgage loans by count in the United States. This is the
    largest percentage that has ever happened in our history. These
    loans are the source, although not the exclusive source, of the
    financial crisis that we face today, and they are currently
    defaulting at unprecedented rates.
        Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played multiple roles in what
    has come to be known as the subprime lending crisis. They
    loosened credit standards for mortgages, which encouraged and
    extended the housing bubble. They trapped millions of people
    into loans they knew were unsustainable. And they destroyed the
    equity savings of tens of millions of homeowners spread
    throughout every congressional district in the United States.
    They accomplished this while being permitted to operate at a
    75:1 leverage ratio that makes Lehman Brothers look like they
    were operating conservatively.
        Relative to some earlier testimony, I detailed the risks
    posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's portfolios in attachment
    No. 4 to my submitted testimony.
        While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may deny it, there can be
    no doubt that they now own or guarantee $1.6 trillion in
    subprime, Alt-A, and other default-prone loans and securities.
    These comprise over one-third of their risk portfolio, not the
    15 percent that they kept referring to during earlier
    testimony. They were responsible for 34 percent of all the
    subprime loans made in the United States and 59 percent of all
    the Alt-A loans made in the United States. They were not bit
    players in this play.
        These 10.5 million nonprime loans are experiencing a
    default rate that is eight times the level of their 20 million
    traditional quality loans. These 10.5 million loans include 5.7
    million subprime, 3.3 million Alt-A, and 1.5 million loans with
    other high-risk characteristics. This 10.5 million total does
    not include FHA's obligations, which add another 3 million to
    the total and bring it to 13.5 million out of the 25 million
    subprime and other default-prone loans. That is more than half.
        According to U.S. bank regulators, subprime loans are
    generally those with FICO scores below 660. An Alt-A, or liar
    loan, was the favorite of the real estate speculator. I
    estimate that 1 million of the GSE's Alt-A loans had no down
    payment.
        The purchase of Alt-A loans was justified because they
    helped meet affordable housing goals. And contrary, again, to
    some earlier testimony, I believe that the Alt-A loans were
    particularly goal rich, because about 20 percent of them were
    made to investors; namely, that meant that properties were
    rental properties. So, the fact that they were done as a no-
    income/no-asset was irrelevant. The location, based on zip
    code, would put them into affordable housing categories, and I
    believe they would get credit for that.
        As a result, GSE's default rates are now skyrocketing.
    Although they are too new to predict default rates with any
    certainty, I would expect that those portions of Fannie Mae's
    and Freddie Mac's 2005 to 2007 books comprising of subprime and
    other default-prone loans experience default rates ranging from
    8 percent for the 2005 originations to over 40 percent for the
    2007 originations. I believe there is a chart that is available
    that shows the performance of their books, and you can see from
    the hockey sticks appearance of the 2007, 2006, and 2005 books
    what is happening.
        One of the reasons that subprime, as it is traditionally
    called, has gotten more publicity is those loans are older.
    These loans are going bad at incredible percentages, but they
    are younger; so, they still have a longer ways to go.
        The losses likely to be suffered by Fannie and Freddie will
    be a terrible burden to the U.S. taxpayers. If the default
    rates I predict actually occur, U.S. taxpayers will have to
    stand behind hundreds of billions of dollars of Fannie Mae and
    Freddie Mac losses.
        This could have been averted. They could have exercised
    leadership, and they had done that twice before, once in the
    mid-1980's and once in the early 1990's. And they could have
    stopped the mortgage madness that was developing in the
    industry. Instead, their response was to open the flood gates.
    And in the years 2005 to 2007, they bought over $1 trillion of
    these junk loans that are still on their books. Their purchases
    were a major factor in the development of the housing bubble
    and in the huge number of defaulted mortgages, which are now
    causing massive declines in house prices. Without Fannie's and
    Freddie's actions, we would not have this unprecedented housing
    crisis.
        A few more observations about Fannie and Freddie turning
    the American dream of home ownership into the American
    nightmare of foreclosure. They followed an origination model
    initially established by FHA. It enabled thinly capitalized
    mortgage bankers and mortgage brokers to take over virtually
    the entire origination market. These mortgage brokers and
    mortgage bankers were able to compete for mortgage originations
    with thousands of well capitalized community banks, banks that
    are conspicuously absent from the epidemic of default-prone
    loan problems Nationwide.
        In late 2004, Richard Syron and Frank Raines both went to
    the meetings of the originator community and made clear that
    they were going to wrest back the subprime and Alt-A mortgage
    market from Wall Street. Syron said, ``Our success in the
    future depends on our ability to serve emerging markets, and
    they've become the surging markets.'' Raines also said, ``We
    have to push products and opportunities to people who have
    lesser credit quality.''
        These statements alerted the originator community that, if
    they could make subprime and Alt-A loans, there was a ready
    market for them. And this stimulated an orgy of junk mortgage
    development.
        Fannie and Freddie used their automated underwriting
    systems to divert subprime and Alt-A loans from private label
    securitizers, driving up the value of these loans and making
    mortgage brokers even more eager to find borrowers regardless
    of their credit standing.
        Why did Fannie and Freddie do this? First, they were trying
    to meet HUD's affordable housing goals which, by 2005, required
    55 percent of all their loans that they purchased be affordable
    housing loans, including 28 percent to low-income and very low-
    income borrowers. Second, after their accounting scandals of
    2003-2004, they were afraid of new and stricter regulation. By
    ramping up their affordable housing lending, that trillion
    dollars I mentioned earlier, they showed their supporters in
    Congress that they could be a major source on a continuing
    basis of affordable housing financing.
        Mr. Chairman, there is much more in my prepared testimony,
    including my recommendations on how to meet this challenge, but
    that is the end of my oral statement. I look forward to your
    questions.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Pinto follows:]

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        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Pinto.
        Mr. Kling.

                       STATEMENT OF ARNOLD KLING

        Mr. Kling. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished members
    of the committee. I would like my written testimony to be
    entered as if I had spoken it.
        Mr. Towns. Without objection.
        Mr. Kling. It is a privilege to be asked to testify in this
    forum today regarding the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie
    Mac and the ongoing financial crisis.
        My name is Arnold Kling. My training is in economics. And
    in the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked at Freddie Mac,
    where I was present at the creation of several quantitative
    risk management tools that paved the way for innovations in
    mortgage finance.
        Speaking as a former financial engineer, I have many
    regrets about the role played by modern financial methods in
    this crisis. Rather than speak defensively about financial
    innovation, I want to offer constructive suggestions for public
    policy going forward.
        I emphatically disagree with the extreme partisan
    narratives of this crisis. To blame the Community Reinvestment
    Act for what happened is wrong. To blame financial deregulation
    for what happened is wrong. The narrative I present in my
    written testimony describes a combination of government failure
    and market failure.
        I want to focus on how both industry executives and
    regulators were fooled about the risks in the system. In
    particular, perverse incentives in bank capital requirements
    encouraged unsound lending practices and promoted excessive
    securitization. When a bank originates a low-risk mortgage, why
    would the bank pay Freddie Mac a fee to guarantee that mortgage
    against default? Freddie Mac has no intrinsic comparative
    advantage in bearing that credit risk. However, in practice,
    the bank was able to reduce its capital requirements by
    exchanging its loans for securities. Forbearing the exact same
    credit risk, Freddie Mac was allowed by its regulator to hold
    less capital than the bank.
        By requiring Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to hold less
    capital than banks, our regulatory system encouraged Freddie
    Mac and Fannie Mae to grow at the expense of traditional
    depository institutions. That turned out to be dangerous.
        The perverse regulatory incentives were even more striking
    with high-risk loans. If a bank originates a high-risk loan,
    you would think that there is no way to avoid high capital
    requirements. But, it turns out that when a high-risk loan has
    been laundered by Wall Street, it can come back into the
    banking system in the form of a AAA rated security tranche. And
    I should mention that you had the people here--I know this
    committee has discussed the problems with the rating agencies
    and that the ratings were bogus. You had the people here this
    morning who were in a position to call them out on it. They
    could have run these securities--Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
    could have run these securities through their stress tests,
    reported that these securities were going to blow up, and put a
    stop to the private-label subprime market right then and there.
    They had the power to do that. But, once they were laundered as
    AAA tranches, from the standpoint of capital requirements, bank
    regulators closed their eyes and pretended that the risk has
    disappeared.
        My reading of the history of the secondary mortgage market
    suggests the following lessons: One, capital requirements
    matter. Details that are easily overlooked by regulators can
    turn out to cause major distortions.
        Two, securitization is not necessary for mortgage lending.
    On a level regulatory playing field, traditional mortgage
    lending by depository institutions probably would prevail over
    securitized lending. Rather than try to revive Freddie Mac and
    Fannie Mae, I would recommend that Congress encourage a
    mortgage lending system based on 30-year mortgages originated
    and held by old-fashioned banks and savings and loans. This
    would require instructing the regulators of Freddie Mac, Fannie
    Mae, banks, and savings and loans to all use the same capital
    standard for mortgages, one that is based on a stress-test
    methodology.
        Three, subsidized mortgage credit is an inefficient tool
    for promoting home ownership. Unless what you want is home
    buyers who are buried in debt and speculating on house price
    appreciation, I recommend that Congress not try to create cheap
    mortgages but instead use other means to encourage home
    ownership.
        Four, recent financial innovations, particularly credit
    default swaps, have changed our financial system in ways that
    current policymakers failed to recognize. Bailouts and rescues
    are counterproductive in today's financial crisis. Within the
    financial sector, deleveraging needs to slow down, and the
    process of shutting down failed institutions needs to speed up.
    Relative to these necessities, handouts from the taxpayers are
    a hindrance, not a help.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Kling follows:]

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        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Kling.
        Mr. Calomiris.

                     STATEMENT OF CHARLES CALOMIRIS

        Mr. Calomiris. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor and
    a pleasure to appear before you and the committee today to
    share my views on the role of the GSEs in the current financial
    crisis and the lessons for GSE reform going forward. I would
    like to ask that my written testimony and two background
    articles which provide more detailed analysis in support of my
    statement also be entered into the record.
        Mr. Towns. Without objection.
        Mr. Calomiris. Mr. Chairman, before I begin, I would like
    to correct a typographical error in one of those background
    documents, the one authored by myself and Peter Wallison. I
    think I can just do it orally.
        In that document, on page 8, in the second column, there
    are two sentences that need to be replaced. They read as
    follows: In the addition, Freddie Mac's disclosures indicate
    that, of the loans added to its portfolio of single family
    loans between 2005 and 2007, 97 percent were interest-only
    mortgages; 85 percent were Alt-A; 72 percent were negative
    amortization loans; 67 percent had FICO scores less than 620;
    and 68 percent had original loan-to-value ratios greater than
    90 percent. There were typos in that two-sentence excerpt, and
    that needs to be replaced with the following.
        Mr. Towns. Let me say, based on that, let me read this and
    you can sort of respond to it as you do your presentation, Mr.
    Calomiris. The committee has received a letter from a former
    Fannie Mae executive, Mr. Barry Zigas. Mr. Zigas disputes the
    way you interpret Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's financial data
    in a recent article you published with Mr. Peter Wallison of
    the American Enterprise Institute. So, you can respond. Since
    the article is now a part of our hearing record, I am going to
    ask unanimous consent to submit Mr. Zigas's letter in the
    hearing record and ask that you respond to it for the record.
    So, you can do that as you move forward.
        Thank you.
        Mr. Calomiris. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Actually, it was through the kindness, I guess, of the
    chairman, who showed me that letter earlier or had it sent to
    me that I looked at the article and recognized these
    typographical errors. So, this correction actually responds and
    completely corrects the article and deals with all of those
    things that gentleman found, and I appreciate his pointing them
    out to me.
        Mr. Towns. I will give you an extra minute in your
    testimony.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, I might ask from a parliamentary
    standpoint, wouldn't it be in our best interest as a unanimous
    consent that we enclose that, that the two be placed next to
    each other in the record, so that there not be a chance that
    this oral testimony would somehow not be exactly next to the
    written? Because I would like the record to be accurate as to
    the original and perhaps----
        Mr. Towns. Without objection.
        [The information referred to follows:]

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        Mr. Issa. Thank you.
        Mr. Calomiris. Now I will read the replacement text.
        Tables one and two show that, for each category of
    mortgages with subprime characteristics, most of the portfolio
    of loans with those characteristics were acquired from 2005 to
    2007. For example, 83.8 percent of Fannie's and 90 percent of
    Freddie's interest-only loans as of September 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 September 2008 were acquired from 2005 to 2007.
        That completes the correction, Mr. Chairman.
        None of the rest of the article requires any correction.
    This apparently--I had not seen the final edits on this
    article. Apparently, someone was confused and made some word
    changes that didn't make sense. I apologize for that. I also
    have to apologize to Mr. Garrett because as I was listening to
    his questions, I think--earlier, I think he actually was
    relying on that exact paragraph. And so my apologies to the
    committee for that mistake.
        Given the time constraint of my oral testimony, I will
    summarize my written testimony by posing and answering a short
    list of questions: Did Fannie and Freddie play an important
    role in the subprime crisis? Yes. As Ed Pinto has shown, they
    ended up holding about 1.6 trillion or roughly half of the
    total non-FHA exposure on subprime losses. And through their
    role as standard setters in the industry, they played a leading
    role in relaxing underwriting standards and promoting no-docs
    lending.
        Was their involvement in subprime simply bad luck, or did
    it reflect purposeful willingness to undertake risks that they
    recognized as dangerous and that they recognized were arguably
    not in the interest of subprime borrowers? Yes. They were
    experienced in this area. They knew the dangers of no-docs
    lending, and they did it anyway. Their risk manager saw the
    losses coming. The risk managers also saw the potential human
    costs of no-docs lending coming and warned senior management
    about it in advance.
        Was the GSE's willingness to undertake these uniquely large
    risk exposures through relaxed underwriting standards on
    subprime loans related to their GSE status and their affordable
    housing mandate? Yes. The GSE charters and the political deal
    between the GSEs and the government, which was understood in
    the marketplace, was that there was a clear quid pro quo
    connecting the implicit government guarantee of GSE's debts and
    other favorable treatment of GSEs with the GSE's willingness to
    expand their funding of affordable housing, and subprime with
    Alt-A was the means they chose to do it.
        And, as the internal e-mails of Freddie Mac clearly show,
    although management recognized the dangers of subprime losses
    because of the crucial need to preserve government support, at
    least in their minds, affordable housing goals, ``tipped the
    balance,'' in 2004 in deciding to relax underwriting standards.
        Would the subprime crisis have been different if the GSEs
    had not decided to enter subprime and Alt-A lending so
    aggressively in 2004? Yes. The GSEs were the dominant players
    in the mortgage market and also played crucial roles as
    standard setters. They recognized their, ``market-making,''
    role, and knew that, in the past, their decision to discontinue
    no-docs lending had led to the disappearance of the product in
    the market.
        Furthermore, the timing of entry by the GSEs was important.
    They came into the subprime and Alt-A market as it was ramping
    up in 2004, and their entry was associated with the rapid
    escalation of lending in 2004 and 2005. Lending nearly tripled.
    Subprime lending nearly tripled in Alt-A from 2003 to 2005.
        Finally, unlike some other market participants, they
    continued to buy long after clear signs of trouble had emerged
    in mid-2006 in the housing market, which meant that their
    market-making role grew over time, particularly so in late 2006
    and 2007, when origination volumes remained very high despite
    the impending problems that were already visible in the housing
    market.
        I conclude that, counterfactually, the crisis would have
    been less than half as large as the actual crisis if the GSEs
    has struck to their traditional roles as prime lenders. I would
    also note that the reason people like me didn't complain about
    this in 2005 and 2006 was that they had adopted accounting
    practices that masked these by the way they defined subprime
    and Alt-A lending.
        Finally, my last comment is, it is worthwhile to promote
    home ownership in the United States. This should be done, in my
    view, not through the GSEs. Their assets, their charters should
    be fully and credibly privatized. It should be done by the
    government on budget, in a transparent manner, befiting our
    democracy, and through direct subsidies, like down payment
    assistance, rather than in a way that encourages borrowers and
    lenders to increase leverage imprudently and therefore, promote
    unwarranted foreclosure risk.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Dr. Calomiris.
        Mr. Stanton.

                      STATEMENT OF THOMAS STANTON

        Mr. Stanton. Mr. Chairman, I would ask that my written
    statement and two attachments be included for the record.
        Mr. Towns. Without objection.
        Mr. Stanton. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Issa, members of
    the distinguished committee, in 1991, I wrote a book called,
    ``A State of Risk: Will Government-Sponsored Enterprises Be the
    Next Financial Crisis?'' I then worked with a small group of
    reformers, including Congressman Jake Pickle of the House Ways
    and Means Committee, Democrat of Texas, and Representative Bill
    Gradison of Ohio, Republican. We tried to improve Federal
    regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their safety and
    soundness, but because of very strong lobbying by those two
    organizations, the regulator was created without adequate
    authority.
        In my testimony today, I would like to make three basic
    points. One, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not cause the
    mortgage credit debacle, they did engage in risky practices
    that turned them into sources of vulnerability, rather than
    strength, for the mortgage market and the larger economy.
        Two, as it becomes clearer that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
    in fact are insolvent, it would help to place them into
    receivership and thereby remove private shareholders from the
    two failed companies. Once shareholders are clearly gone, the
    next administration can use the two companies to provide much
    needed support and reform, including consumer protections for
    the home mortgage market. If the companies remain in
    conservatorship rather than receivership, then government will
    face conflicting objectives about the role of the two companies
    in serving urgent public purposes versus serving financial
    interests of the companies and their shareholders.
        Three, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should not be restored to
    their previous status as privately owned organizations that
    operate with pervasive Federal backing. The two companies and
    their powerful constituencies have consistently fought for
    higher leverage and against effective accountability. Even if a
    strong regulator were created initially, and somebody mentioned
    the concept of public utility regulation, the political power
    of the two companies can be expected to weaken accountability
    over time and restore the companies to their dominant market
    positions, high leverage and financial vulnerability.
        Let me briefly talk about the first point and leave the
    rest for discussion.
        Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed serious misjudgments
    that helped to bring about their insolvency. The most serious
    of these misjudgments involved the company's resistance to
    accepting more effective supervision and capital standards. For
    years, the two companies exerted their influence to fend off
    capital standards that would have reduced their excessive
    leverage and absorbed potential losses. The two companies
    compounded the problem by taking on excessive risk just at the
    point that housing prices were peeking. Among other losing
    assets, the two companies held would over $2 billion of
    private-label mortgage related securities backed by Alt-A or
    subprime mortgages in 2007.
        In making these mistakes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
    revealed the inherent vulnerabilities of government-sponsored
    enterprise [GSE], as an organizational model. First, the GSE
    can live or die according to its charter and other laws that
    determine the condition under which it operates. That means
    that GSEs select their chief officers in good part based on
    ability to manage political risk, as we saw in the first panel
    today, rather than on their ability to manage two of the
    largest financial institutions in the world.
        Second, GSEs combine private ownership with government
    backing in a way that creates a virtually unstoppable political
    force. Because of their government backing and low capital
    requirements, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gained immense market
    power. They doubled in size every 5 years or so until this year
    the two companies funded over $5 trillion of mortgages, about
    40 percent of the mortgage market. Their market power gave them
    political power, which is seen in the fact that the new
    regulator created by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of
    2008, enacted late July just before the companies collapsed,
    still failed to give the new regulator the full mandate,
    authority, or discretion over safety and soundness and systemic
    risk that is available to the Federal bank regulators. And if
    there is a question on this, I would be delighted to submit
    documentation to the record.
        In short, the mix of private incentives and government
    backing created a dynamic that led not only to the hubris that
    brought about the meltdown of internal controls of both Fannie
    Mae and Freddie Mac several years ago, but also their
    insolvency in 2008.
        But, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by themselves did not cause
    the housing bubble or the proliferation of subprime and other
    mortgages that borrowers could not afford to repay. In
    analyzing the two companies, I discovered a phenomenon can be
    called Stanton's law: Risk will migrate to the place where
    government is least equipped to deal with it. So, the capital
    markets arbitraged across regulatory requirements and
    ultimately sent trillions of dollars of mortgages to Fannie Mae
    and Freddie Mac where capital requirements were low and Federal
    supervision was weak. But, the capital markets also found other
    places where government could not manage the risk and also sent
    huge volumes of subprime, Alt-A, interest-only, and other toxic
    mortgages to structured investment vehicles of commercial
    banks, private securitization conduits, and collateralized debt
    obligations that were virtually unsupervised.
        Mr. Chairman, I would like to end on a note about the human
    costs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their actions led to
    hundreds of thousands of American families, and possibly more
    than a million, facing delinquency and default on their
    mortgages and potential foreclosure of their homes.
        They funded the overbuilding of hundreds of thousands of
    homes that will be vacant or boarded up because no one wants to
    live there. The cost to the American taxpayer will run
    potentially to hundreds of billions of dollars. All of this
    harm occurred on the watch of the four men on the first panel.
    It could have been avoided with prudent lending, prudent
    capital, and prudent management.
        So, thank you again for holding this important hearing on
    two financial institutions that used their high leverage and
    insatiable appetites to grow to an unmanageable size before
    they failed. I would be pleased to respond to any questions.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Stanton follows:]

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        Mr. Towns. Let me thank you very, very much for your
    testimony.
        You know, I think it would have been wise for us to allow
    them to go first and then allow the others to stay and to
    listen and then respond, because I really think, in terms of
    the testimony and information that they have given us, it has
    been very, very, very helpful.
        Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, I totally agree with you, and, in
    fact, of all the things that my hope as ranking member and your
    hope as chairman that I would like to do is to make that
    reversal whenever possible so that, whether it's administration
    or other government witnesses, we're able to do just that. I
    think you're exactly right. It would have been very helpful
    today.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much for your comment.
        Let me move right along. I would like to ask, I guess, let
    me start with you, Mr. Stanton, and, of course, others to
    respond. I would like to ask the panel about the affordable
    housing goal that the Department of Housing and Urban
    Development set for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And, Mr.
    Stanton, in your testimony--I think it was page 5 and 6, you
    explained that when Congress rechartered Fannie and Freddie in
    1992, we asked them to devote some of their time and resources
    to finding ways to help low- and moderate-income Americans buy
    homes. But, you said that these goals did not lead Fannie and
    Freddie to invest in risky mortgages. Can you explain to us
    your conclusion and how you arrive at that?
        Mr. Stanton. Yes, sir. I would be delighted.
        If you look carefully at the law--and I'm a student of the
    charters of the two companies and the legal frameworks
    surrounding them--you find that they are required to undertake
    activities, ``relating to mortgages on housing for low- and
    moderate-income families involving a reasonable economic return
    that may be less than the return earned on other activities.''
        In other words, the law does not require them, they do not
    receive appropriations to take losses on the affordable housing
    loans they make. And if you follow that through to the 1992
    act, and it follows through to 2008, what you see is that the
    Department of Housing and Urban Development is not allowed to
    impose goals that would cause the companies to fall below that
    standard.
        So, in fact, when you look, two things were probably going
    on. One, it's a more subtle point. These are political
    companies. Their leaders are retained to manage political risk.
    So, that means they will engage in affordable housing beyond
    HUD in order to get favors for other parts of their charter,
    either to block things they don't want or to gain things they
    do want.
        And, of course, they also had insatiable appetites. When
    you buy $200 billion of Triple-A-rated mortgage securities
    backed by Alt-A and subprime mortgages and you don't ask your
    own risk analysts to run those mortgages through the filter in
    order to do due diligence and check on the rating agencies,
    you're asking for trouble. But you're not doing that to support
    the affordable housing market. You're doing that because you
    expect that there are good returns on those investments.
        Mr. Towns. Other members of the panel agree on that?
        Mr. Pinto. I have a little different take on that.
        When the original goals were set subsequent to the 1992
    legislation, I believe HUD set them in 1993, and they were set
    a little bit purposely low because they didn't quite know what
    was going to happen. And Fannie and Freddie sort of jumped over
    the hurdles very quickly; and that created a backlash that
    said, wait a minute, HUD, you set them too low. And HUD learned
    from that, and year after year, they kept ratcheting them up
    and ratcheting them up.
        Fannie and Freddie had to keep--remember, this is a
    duopoly. They're competing against each other for the same
    loans. They're also competing with FHA for the same loans.
    They're all considered goal rich. Ultimately, they were
    competing with subprime for the same loans. They were
    considered goal rich, and their regulators called all of these
    loans goal rich.
        By the early part of this decade, you had situations where
    at the end of the year, if they were a little bit short, a
    bidding war would break out. In fact, Fannie rented some loans
    for a while. That was a scandal that developed 5 or 6 years ago
    where they rented some loans and then returned them later the
    next year in order to meet their goals.
        So, the pressures that were put on them were tremendous.
    But, I would point out that I believe in the 2007 Freddie Mac
    document, they concluded that the lowest 10 percent of their
    business was put on the books at a zero return on equity. That
    does not meet the standard that was in the charter. A zero
    return on equity, and that was calculated optimistically. It
    turns out if you were to do that calculation today, these loans
    were put on the books at tremendous losses.
        Mr. Towns. Yes. Dr. Calomiris.
        Mr. Calomiris. I just want to add that I think that there
    are obviously other motivations, too, for getting involved in
    subprime and the e-mail correspondence that I saw from Freddie
    Mac indicated that. But, I think that what was interesting is
    that in all those e-mails, it was also reflected that
    affordable housing goals in this political sort of strategy
    that Mr. Stanton referred to were part of the mix and that one
    of the e-mails specifically said tip the balance when they were
    considering whether to get into the no docs area and Alt-A and
    subprime more broadly.
        So, I think it's important to mention both that there are
    multiple influences. Let's face it. There were a lot of
    managers who weren't JFCs who were pursuing this, too, based on
    short-term profits for themselves at the expense of their
    stockholders. I would say that the executives of the GSEs were
    guilty of that as well, but that I think it's pretty clear from
    the e-mails that the affordable housing mandate and their,
    let's say, political manipulation of that was definitely part
    of the story.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you.
        Mr. Stanton. If I could add something, Mr. Chairman, these
    are two companies funding $5 trillion in mortgages. The whole
    point of trying to underwrite mortgages for people that are
    nontraditional borrowers is to do it carefully and really work
    at it, so that you try to, in fact, make people eligible for
    mortgages. Because the normal FICO score, for example, is based
    on traditional borrowers, not on affordable housing borrowers.
    And that isn't what they did. They simply plunged in and bought
    huge volumes of mortgages without regard to the welfare of the
    people they could have underwritten more carefully. So, that is
    part of the problem, too.
        Mr. Towns. Mr. Issa.
        Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        This is a wonderful panel, and I appreciate your
    statements, and, obviously, we will be poring over them well
    into the next Congress.
        I'm almost befuddled to try to come up with how many
    questions we could ask, but let me start with Mr. Pinto. The
    earlier panel--which I would have liked you first, but I'm also
    glad you're after--seemed to want to make a distinction between
    Alt-A and subprime; and even when we started asking about it,
    we got told, well, some of the Alt-As are subprime, and some
    are the other. From a standpoint of deviating from sound
    practices that lead to reasonable default rates, is there any
    real difference?
        Mr. Pinto. No. Alt-A actually stood--one of the meanings of
    it was Alt Agency. They were things that the agencies would not
    buy.
        How do I know that? Because, in 1985, I was one of the
    authors of Fannie Mae's revised underwriting requirements; and
    in that revised underwriting statement, we said we were not
    going to do the kinds of loans that ended up being high-risk,
    too high a risk for Fannie Mae to undertake: investor loans,
    particularly three and four units, excess loans on condos.
    There were many different types: low start rates on ARMS, neg
    am ARMS--we called them gyp ARMS--graduated payment ARMS. There
    were all kinds of loans, and those were the loans that became
    known as Alt-A.
        I was happy to hear CEO Raines say earlier that Fannie
    actually remembered what had happened in the early 1980's, in
    the mid 1980's, and it happened in the late 1980's when the no
    doc, low doc business blew up, that they remembered that, but
    they did not learn.
        Starting in the early 1990's, they came back with a 97
    percent mortgage, which they had no basis for figuring out what
    the risks were. Freddie Mac, I put it in the record, had--
    showed a 95 percent loan. The default rates on those things
    were sky high. They just about go off the chart. Yet they were
    doing 97 percent loans on the basis of no data. And that was
    the beginning of this process.
        So, the Alt-A loans, the subprime loans, I lump them all
    together.
        How did I end up coming up with 1.6 trillion? It's very
    simple. If you look at the kinds of risks--again, Frank Raines
    referred to them as what we learned in the 1980's and early
    1990's. If you look at the kind of risks that they entered into
    on the 1.6 trillion, they knew those were risky loans. They
    performed under stress the same way. They all have incredibly
    high default rates, and they're performing that way exactly
    today. So, every category I put on my chart ends up being in
    that same bucket.
        Mr. Issa. I appreciate that.
        And, Mr. Calomiris, I see you're shaking your head yes, so
    I think we've established today that we're not going to find a
    difference in spite of the distinction being made by the
    earlier panel.
        I would ask two things. First of all, would all of you be
    willing to answer additional questions for the record? Because
    I know I am running out of time, and I very much would like to
    get them in the record.
        With that, I would ask a couple of questions that are not
    likely to be asked normally and the public has a right to
    understand.
        The vast majority of States, including my own, California,
    have no recourse loans, meaning that no matter how much funding
    somebody has in their personal pocket, including that earlier
    testified roughly 20 percent who were speculators, they're able
    to get a no-money-down, no-stated-income loan, and they're able
    to never occupy that home, perhaps hold it for rental, or
    perhaps just hold it to flip.
        At one of the points in this whole debacle, the turning
    back in or the failure to pay or in some cases--we've had it in
    California--people bought homes, rented them out, never made
    the payments, and waited for the foreclosure. They were
    guaranteed if they put nothing down and rented them out, that
    they were going to make money because they collected rent and
    paid nothing out.
        And, Mr. Stanton, I know you're smiling, but as you see
    them, you begin to realize that not everyone is a victim that
    in fact took out a loan. Should we on this dais look at a
    recourse structure to government-backed, government-guaranteed,
    government-underwritten loans, so as to take the speculator,
    who does have other assets out of the equation of taking this
    ``heads I win, tails the government lose'' situation?
        Mr. Stanton, you were shaking your head earlier. Would you
    agree that could be a tool that we would have a right to do
    since we, the people, we, the representatives of people, are
    paying out potentially trillions of dollars and, in some cases,
    the money is because of speculators, who kept their money and,
    in fact, left us holding the bag?
        Mr. Stanton. Absolutely, and that is the logic that led me
    to recommend these companies be removed from conservatorship
    now that they have an apparent negative value, put in
    receivership and used essentially as government corporations.
        It was stunning to hear these CEOs say, gee, it would have
    been nice to have consumer protections. In fact, as a
    government corporation, without worrying about shareholders,
    there would be a way then to impose risk-sharing requirements
    on all the participants up and down the line, to structure much
    more sound ways of doing business and to add, if I can make a
    plug for a colleague, Alex Pollock of the American Enterprise
    Institute, basic consumer protections.
        He has a one-page mortgage form; and one of the questions
    on the one-page mortgage form is what is the highest monthly
    payment that this mortgage could ever go to? That is a really
    simple question that reveals what happens when you have these
    teaser rates. Because a whole bunch of those mortgages' answer
    might have been infinity; there are no natural limits.
        So, as a government corporation, we could use both Fannie
    Mae and Freddie Mac to do the kind of risk sharing you're
    talking about, impose serious consumer protections, and create
    serious standards for the market going forward. Thank you.
        Mr. Kling.
        Mr. Kling. Congressman Issa, I hope that you will keep
    raising the issue of investor loans and nonowner-occupied
    loans. Because your colleagues often seem to forget, and they
    talk about foreclosure moratoriums and work-outs being a
    solution for this, but nobody has told me what the percentage
    of nonowner-occupied loans is. We know that 15 percent of the
    loans made in 2005 and 2006 were nonowner occupied.
        And I would just step back and say, rather than make those
    recourse loans, ask why are they eligible for any government
    guarantee at all? If your goal is to promote homeownership, I
    assume you're not trying to promote home speculating. So, why
    are they eligible for Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, or any
    government guaranty at all?
        Mr. Issa. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I think with that we will probably realize that home
    homeownership and being a homeowner and renting out to others
    is not quite the same thing, and I appreciate it. Homes
    ownership, as the chairman said.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much.
        Congressman Bilbray from California.
        Mr. Bilbray. Thank you very much. And let me thank the
    panel; and, Mr. Kling, thank you for throwing darts at both
    sides. It is kind of refreshing in this town.
        There is a whole lot of things I would love to jump right
    into, but when we get into this issue of unsecured, basically,
    finding ways to be able to qualify people at any cost, I don't
    know if you guys are aware of it and the ranking member will
    say--will remember this.
        In 2005, in San Diego, there was a big deal about the fact
    that you not only did not have to be a U.S. citizen, you did
    not only not have to be legally in the country, you didn't even
    have to show a viable ID that you were who you said you were to
    get a loan. And many of those loans were through nonprofits
    that were getting grants from the Federal Government.
        So, this is how deep we got into this issue, and it wasn't
    just the nonprofits, but it was the for-profits were searching
    out anybody and everybody that we can figure out how to get
    them to sign up on this program. Because they were--basically,
    seems like you create the paper and you have all these foreign
    investors love to buy sight unseen but to the point of where
    somebody wasn't even required to prove that they were whoever
    the name was on the loan, didn't even have to show a U.S.
    viable ID. They were using consulate cards from another country
    that is issued based on the honors system.
        I only raise this to show you how far this goes. And I will
    be very interested to see, do we require legal status, viable
    identification under the REAL ID bill to participate in the
    bailout that is going on now or the refinancing and everything
    else? I don't hear anything about that. It's just like, well,
    anybody and everybody can got into the system. The more the
    merrier.
        You brought up the credit default issue, the swaps. And I
    know that is not specific to here. But from the testimony we've
    seen, this is a huge ax hanging over our head right now.
    Anybody knows where it is? How many trillion--anybody got any
    idea how many trillions of dollars--what is the number that is
    floating around now with credit default swaps?
        Mr. Kling. Sixty-two trillion or something? Sixty trillion
    outstanding as of the end of last year gross. It came from
    nothing 10 years ago.
        Mr. Bilbray. Which was really a product of our regulatory
    reforms squeezed off one side and left it wide open, and the
    bulge started coming out there.
        And, Mr. Chairman, I think that is one of the things the
    new Congress really has to look at. Here comes 60 trillion--
    think about that--is the culture shock we've had with the 1.3
    we've issued since March but 60 trillion hanging out there and,
    basically, Vegas could give better odds. It's a lot of gambling
    out there.
        So, I want to just in this hearing point out, we have this
    huge, huge threat out there that nobody is really talking about
    because we're kind of responding to the problems of the past
    and not seeing this coming down the pike.
        Guys, any comments about that? Because you have been frank
    and open about it, and I think it's important that the--
    hopefully, the future chairman and ranking member of this
    committee is here to hear it.
        Mr. Calomiris. Yes, I'd just like to say something briefly
    about that.
        On an optimistic note, remember that credit default swaps
    are a zero net sum game. So, even if there are 60 trillion in
    nominal exposure, the aggregate exposure in the financial
    system is always zero.
        Now, there is a problem, of course; and we saw that with
    AIG and its credit default swap position vis-a-vis Goldman
    Sachs. And that problem is that if somebody is on the brink of
    failing and they aren't properly collateralized in their
    positions, which was the case for AIG because it had AAA
    status, was not the case for Lehman Brothers, by the way,
    because it didn't have triplea status.
        So we did have a problem with AIG because of its AAA status
    and its lack of collateralization; and so it could have added
    significantly tens of billions, maybe more, to the cost of a
    cleanup.
        But, more generally, the problem isn't nearly as bad as the
    sort of headline numbers are indicating; and it was very
    particularly a problem for AIG precisely because of AIG's AAA
    status.
        Mr. Pinto. And that was demonstrated by Lehman Brothers
    when they unwound. There was--I believe it was a nothing. It
    all happened, and everybody yawned, and the reason was exactly
    what Charlie just said. And they had a lot outstanding.
        Mr. Kling. In my written testimony, I spell out what I
    think are the problems with credit default swaps. I don't think
    we in the economics and finance profession fully grasp the
    magnitude of what is going on and the implications of what is
    going on there. And I think it's quite possible that a lot of
    the panic deleveraging that is going on and the very strange
    relationships in security prices that we're seeing today, I
    strongly suspect that has a lot to do with the way the credit
    default swap market operates.
        Mr. Stanton. I think the issue of credit default swaps has
    been covered, but I want to point out something else on the
    horizon that is worth looking at. Particularly since Charles
    was so optimistic, I can be a bit pessimistic.
        We have seen a huge number of defaults now because of bad
    mortgages, mortgages that never should have been issued in the
    first place, subprime Alt-A, whatever we want to call them.
    What we have not seen yet is the full impact of defaults on
    homes because a recession hits, and that has been the
    traditional source of defaults on homes. So, we can expect a
    second wave to be coming in.
        And again I reiterate, it's time to take both GSEs in hand
    as government corporations. Stop this incessant, gee, do we
    price high? Do we price low? Because we have to satisfy
    shareholders because it's a conservatorship, not a
    receivership, versus we've got to support the housing market
    and start using the GSEs actively to start dealing with what is
    going to be a much worse problem.
        Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Chairman, I just want to say the three of
    us up here actually are sons of areas that were red-lined
    consistently before this; and I think we understand the
    challenges for the working class neighborhoods because it was
    our neighborhoods that were red-lined by these institutions
    before; and we need to address that.
        I think we need to recognize, too, that a lot of this that
    we don't even talk about is that not just homeownership but
    what was perceived as a minimum homeownership back in the early
    1970's, late 1970's, early 1980's. You will remember that
    homeownership, the first step was usually into an attached
    condominium, something you could afford, build equity. You
    build your credit rating. You worked into it.
        What we've seen in the last 10 years is don't even think
    about those things. They're going for the four, five-bedroom
    detached house and whatever. And I think we have to understand
    a level of expectation needs to be reflected appropriately,
    especially for people trying to get out of those neighborhoods
    that we grew up in or to buy a home in those neighborhoods.
        Mr. Towns. Thank you very much and thank you.
        The gentleman from Idaho, Congressman Sali.
        Mr. Sali. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Gentlemen, I'm sorry that I was gone for a short while
    while you were giving your testimony. I had looked at some of
    the information you had provided earlier, and I guess there are
    two pieces to the puzzle as Congress wrestles with what to do
    going forward.
        The first one is, if you start today and you're going to
    make a sound loan, how do you do that? And I think most of your
    information goes to that.
        Mr. Pinto, you have the chart that you talked about I think
    during your presentation, and I'm looking at the 2007 graph,
    and it doesn't look very rosy. Those loans already made, how do
    we get that bleeding stopped? Because this is going to impact--
    this piece is going to--if we started making good loans today,
    this piece will still impact things profoundly. What should we
    do to try and shore that up?
        Mr. Pinto. Excellent question.
        In my prepared remarks, I proposed two solutions, a short-
    term and a long-term. The short-term, and I liken it to you're
    fighting a forest fire, it's very simple. Where did you fight
    the fire? At the fire line or away from the fire line? If it's
    out of control, you have to fight it away from the fire line.
    You have to build a firebreak. And I have looked at all the
    different modification programs that are being proposed; and
    none of them establish a fire line, away from the firebreak,
    away from the line of fire.
        I'm not one who normally espouses that the Federal
    Government spend a lot of money for something. However, the
    issue that we've got--it was just touched on by Mr. Stanton,
    about the second wave that is coming--it's actually a second
    and third wave. The second wave is, Fannie and Freddie's book
    of business is new, does things that have been causing the
    foreclosures to a large extent in the past, that were loans
    made earlier in this decade, the ones that were made in 2005,
    2006 and 2007 are just--you can see it--are just starting to go
    bad; and the ultimate foreclosure rates are going to be way up
    here. They're going to be way off the charts. And that is the
    second wave.
        The third wave is what is known as the real economy, the
    people who actually played by the rules, and now they're losing
    their job or whatever. And I have estimated that by the end of
    next year, with the price declines that everyone is agreeing
    on, 1 percent a month to the end of next year, that there is
    going to be $12.2 trillion of mortgage debt outstanding and $11
    trillion of home value. That is a national LTV on people--loan
    to value--on people that have homes of 111 percent.
        That has never happened before, I will say, in the history
    of United States. I don't think it has ever happened before in
    the history of the world. In the Depression, it was 30 percent.
    So, that is what we're looking at.
        So, the second and third waves are coming. So, what do you
    do? You have to identify, and we can identify these loans.
    Fannie Mae has a great little chart. Freddie Mac has the same
    chart. Everybody else knows--the New York Fed has all these
    charts. Everybody knows where all these loans are, ones that
    are defaulted and not defaulted.
        We know what the characteristics of the loans are. We
    know--I have identified there are $4.4 trillion of junk loans
    out there. We have to find a few trillion of those that are
    owner occupants, and we have to identify them, and we have to
    put together a program that has the five steps that I listed in
    my testimony and make an offer to those people to refinance
    them.
        But, you're going to have to bring down the principal
    amount substantially so that you create equity and create that
    cushion. You have to create a strong firebreak. But, it's also
    very important that you don't put 50-year loans--I hear them
    talking about extending the term to 40 and 50 years. That is
    crazy. You want equity building back up, not pushing it way
    out.
        You can't be pushing delinquencies on the back end. That
    doesn't create incentive to stay in these homes. We have to
    create hope for these people to continue with these loans and
    continue in their homes, and the way you do that is the
    proposal that I laid out in my testimony.
        The second part, which I will just reference, is we have to
    deleverage the whole housing system. We have overleveraged the
    entire system starting with the homeowner, going to the banks,
    Fannie Mae, which now has no capital, but they were
    overleveraged 75 to 1 all along, and then the mortgage-backed
    securities which were overleveraged. Congress created a system
    that overleveraged everything all the way through. We have to
    deleverage that.
        If I would ask the committee to do anything, it is to look
    at the question of how do you deleverage the financial system
    of the United States. It used to work when the leverage was 3.7
    to 1. We've changed it to 30 to 40 to 1. It's not sustainable.
        Mr. Sali. You're suggesting that the mortgage lenders are
    going to have to take the loss of writing down the principal--
    --
        Mr. Pinto. Well, the Federal Government is on the hook
    for--I hate to tell you this. You already own 77 percent of all
    the mortgages in the United States, own or on the credit hook
    for them. Therefore, it comes back to us.
        Mr. Sali. Well, we spent a half a trillion dollars in
    deficit in last year's budget. That doesn't count the 700
    billion of bailout, the 85 for AIG, the other 35 for Bear
    Stearns; and, I mean, that list goes on and on and on. And now
    we're talking about the automakers. We don't have any money.
    What are we going to write down against, just more deficit
    spending? I realize the taxpayers are going to have to be on
    the hook----
        Mr. Pinto. You already own these loans. You're responsible
    for them. 4.6 trillion of the 12 trillion is Fannie Mae and
    Freddie Mac. Who owns Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
        Mr. Sali. But, you're suggesting we can create value out of
    thin air.
        Mr. Pinto. No. No. I'm not creating value out of thin air.
    You have to write down these mortgages to a level where the
    people that are in them, the homeowners, have an incentive for
    staying there. Putting them through the foreclosure process is
    slow death. It's letting the fire burn out of control. You're
    going to have 8 million, 8 million foreclosures if you don't
    get ahead of this rampaging fire. I'm telling you, there are
    going be to be, in the next 4 years, 8 million foreclosures.
    That is out of 57 million loans that we've already had 2 or 3
    million foreclosures. That is 8 million more.
        Mr. Kling. I'm going to disagree with that. We've agreed on
    a lot of stuff so far, but I'm going to disagree. Personally,
    my instinct is kind of yours, that the government--my concern
    is that if the government gets involved trying to bail out at
    the homeowner level, you don't know in Washington which
    homeowner can follow through with a mark, with a principal
    write down, which homeowner cannot. You can't manage that from
    Washington.
        The administrative expenses of that are going to be huge,
    and that is--I think 10 years from now all you're going to have
    to show for that is lots of administrative expenses, lots of
    repeat defaults and, worst of all, a housing market that is
    still out of balance because people don't know where the prices
    are, where the prices belong in the housing market.
        I would say in the end it would be cheaper to take those 8
    million people, pay for moving trucks, hold the door for them,
    get them out or turn them into renters than it will be to try
    to rework the mortgages. That is my prediction. I hope it's not
    correct, because I know that you're going to want to rework the
    mortgages, but that is my fear.
        Mr. Sali. Aren't those same 8 million people going to live
    in those same houses, though? They're just going to trade
    addresses at the end of the day, aren't they? You're not going
    to build 8 million more apartments for them to live in.
        Mr. Kling. Or they will rent their houses. But, we have to
    get to a natural market with supply and demand in balance.
    Because as long as you try to prop up people in houses that
    they couldn't--that they didn't belong in in the first place,
    the rest of the market is not going to be cured. That is my
    fear. My fear is that 10 years from now, we're still going to
    be arguing how to bail out the housing market because it will
    still be--the fire will still be raging.
        Mr. Calomiris. May I just talk briefly about this? Because
    I know we have a lot of other questions.
        I think there are elements of what both of them said that
    make sense. First of all, as Ed said, the exit has to be
    viable; and I think also you know both of them agree on that.
    That is, you're not going to want to just paper this over
    without writing down principal substantially.
        My own view, though--and here I disagree with Ed. I don't
    think that the home prices that he is taking for granted, which
    is I think probably derived from the Case-Schiller Index, I
    think that is an exaggerated measure of already where we are on
    the downside; and it's also exaggerated in its projections. So,
    there are technical issues here. There is a huge uncertainty
    about what that home equity shortfall is going to be, and I
    don't agree with the numbers that he quoted.
        But, I would agree, though, also with what Dr. Kling said.
    We don't want to make the solution in Washington. But I think
    they are pieces of what Ed said that can be done in a
    decentralized way.
        So, here is the answer, basically, in one sentence,
    according to me. Singling out owner-occupied homes, have a
    government-loss-sharing arrangement that would incentivize
    privately servicers or owners of mortgages to write down
    principal and interest quickly if the taxpayer is sharing some
    of those losses. So, they did this in Mexico in 1999. It worked
    very well because the thing had a timeline.
        If you want to participate in the loss sharing to mitigate
    the foreclosures, to avoid the foreclosures, you have to move
    very quickly. And what you really want to do is on the margin
    push the lenders with a little bit of money to decide to write
    down rather than foreclose. Because if they foreclose, they're
    going to lose a lot, too.
        So, you don't have to spend so much. You can get the
    private sector to spend a lot and let them decide the size of
    the writedown so long as it leads to a mortgage that is
    realistic. So, that is my view, and I have written about it.
        Mr. Stanton. And if I can supplement that, because my area
    is design of organizations and programs.
        Once again, if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were government
    corporations, they have relations with lenders all over the
    country. In fact, as we saw in the colloquy between Mr. Issa
    and Dr. Kling, not all homeowners are alike. Some deserve one
    treatment. Some deserve another. And it has been suggested that
    we essentially provide some sort of legal insulation for the
    servicer of the mortgage and then have a trustee in localities
    to sit there and work out. And if a homeowner goes to that
    trustee, they bind themselves, whatever decision, and the
    decision can range from pay or be foreclosed on to you get
    bankruptcy with cramdown features, to we're going to
    restructure your mortgage. There could be a range of
    alternatives.
        And if I have to think of two institutions that have the
    connections around the country to administer that kind of
    program and possibly with what some of the aspects that Charles
    Calomiris is talking about, Fannie and Freddie would be it.
    Before we can go there, we need to take those institutions
    formally into government hands so they're not all worried
    about, gee, do we have to satisfy those shareholders, that 20
    percent of shareholders that are still there that are going to
    want value in their company in the future.
        But, they would be the administrative mechanism, and they
    would be the people I would consult with first once they were
    in government hands. How do we make this work?
        And I agree with Charles. Housing prices are going to still
    go down. But, at some point, we can't afford to have 8 million
    people facing the disruption of their lives in foreclosure.
    There are cheaper ways to do it and less costly for people,
    lenders, and the government.
        Mr. Towns. Let me say to the gentlemen, your time has long
    expired.
        Let me thank all the witnesses. I really appreciate your
    coming and sharing with us. And, of course, let me also add
    that we have 7 days for additional comments as well. So, thank
    you very, very much for your testimony. We look forward to
    working with you in the days and months ahead. Thank you for
    coming.
        [Whereupon, at 3:38 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
        [Additional information submitted for the hearing record
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