Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac placed into conservatorship

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that buy mortgages from lenders and package them into securities, together backed roughly half of all US home loans by 2008 — a scale that made their financial health a matter of national concern as home prices fell and mortgage defaults surged. Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act in July 2008, creating a new regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with explicit authority to place either company into conservatorship if their capital positions deteriorated too far. Just over a month later, on September 6, 2008, with both companies' own boards agreeing, FHFA placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, effectively taking control of their operations and assets. The Treasury Department backed the move the next day with Senior Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements, committing taxpayer funds to keep the companies solvent. Both remain under conservatorship, one of the longest-running federal interventions of the crisis, with no clear timeline for winding it down.