September 7, 2008 The New York Times

U.S. Unveils Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants

The Treasury Department on Sunday seized control of the quasi-public mortgage finance giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and announced a four-part rescue plan that included an open-ended guarantee to provide as much capital as they need to stave off insolvency.

At a news conference on Sunday morning, the Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. also announced that he had dismissed the chief executives of both companies and replaced them with two long-time financial executives. Herbert M. Allison, the former chairman of TIAA-CREF, the huge pension fund for teachers, will take over Fannie Mae and succeed Daniel H. Mudd. At Freddie Mac, David M. Moffett, currently a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group, the large private equity firm, will succeed Richard F. Syron. Mr. Mudd and Mr. Syron, however, will stay on temporarily to help with the transition.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so large and so interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would cause great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe,” Mr. Paulson said. “This turmoil would directly and negatively impact household wealth: from family budgets, to home values, to savings for college and retirement. A failure would affect the ability of Americans to get home loans, auto loans and other consumer credit and business finance. And a failure would be harmful to economic growth and job creation.”

Mr. Paulson refused to say how much capital the government might eventually have to provide, or what the ultimate cost to taxpayers might be.

The companies are likely to need tens of billions of dollars over the next year, but the ultimate cost to taxpayers will largely depend on how fast the housing and mortgage markets recover.

Fannie and Freddie have each agreed to issue $1 billion of senior preferred stock to the United States; it will pay an annual interest rate of at least 10 percent. In return, the government is committing up to $100 billion to each company to cover future losses. The government also receives warrants that would allow it to buy up to 80 percent of each company’s common stock at a nominal price, or less than $1 a share.

Beginning in 2010, the companies must also pay the Treasury a quarterly fee - the amount to be determined - for any financial support provided under the agreement.

Standard & Poor’s, the bond rating agency, said Sunday that the government’s AAA/A-1+ sovereign credit rating would not be affected by the takeover.

Mr. Paulson’s plan begins with a pledge to provide additional cash by buying a new series of preferred shares that would offer dividends and be senior to both the existing preferred shares and the common stock that investors already hold.

The two companies would be allowed to “modestly increase” the size of their existing investment portfolios until the end of 2009, which means they will be allowed to use some of their new taxpayer-supplied capital to buy and hold new mortgages in investment portfolios.

But in a strong indication of Mr. Paulson’s long-term desire to wind down the companies’ portfolios, drastically shrink the role of both Fannie and Freddie and perhaps eliminate their unique status altogether, the plan calls for the companies to start reducing their investment portfolios by 10 percent a year, beginning in 2010.

The investment portfolios now total just over $1.4 trillion, and the plan calls for that to eventually shrink to $250 billion each, or $500 billion total.

“Government support needs to be either explicit or nonexistent, and structured to resolve the conflict between public and private purposes,” Mr. Paulson said. “We will make a grave error if we don’t use this time out to permanently address the structural issues presented by the G.S.E.’s,” he added, a reference to the companies as government-sponsored enterprises.

Critics have long argued that Fannie and Freddie were taking advantage of the widespread assumption that the federal government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Administration officials as well as the Federal Reserve have argued that the two companies used those implicit guarantees to borrow money at below-market rates and lend money at above-market returns, and that they had become what amounted to gigantic hedge funds operating with only a sliver of capital to protect them from unexpected surprises.

That covenant in the agreement responds to many in the Bush administration and in the private sector who had argued for years that Fannie and Freddie posed “systemic risks” to the economy because they had acquired more than $5 trillion in assets with only the thinnest of capital cushions to shield them from losses.

Treasury officials had little choice but to step in. With the credit markets still in a tailspin and investors reluctant to buy up mortgages with even a hint of risk, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee about 70 percent of all new home loans, according to James B. Lockhart, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mr. Paulson said the Treasury Department would provide as much money as needed to keep the companies’ capital reserves from falling below the levels that would trigger rules that automatically put them into receivership.

In addition, the Treasury Department will create a “Secured Lending Credit Facility,” a back-up source of borrowing in the event the companies cannot borrow enough money on the open market to finance their main business of buying mortgages and reselling them as pools of mortgage-backed securities.

In a possibly unprecedented move into the private markets, the Treasury Department will also buy billions of dollars in Fannie and Freddie mortgage securities on the open market. This move is likely to make it much easier for the companies to finance somewhat riskier loans.

Mr. Lockhart said the dividends on the two companies’ common and preferred shares would be eliminated, but that the shares would remain outstanding. The principal and interest payments on their subordinated debt, however, will continue to be made.

“Conservatorship does not eliminate the outstanding preferred stock, but does place preferred shareholders second, after the common shareholders, in absorbing losses,“ Mr. Paulson said.

The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who participated in the private discussions by government officials in devising the bailout plan, issued a statement praising the move. “These necessary steps will help to strengthen the U.S. housing market and promote stability in our financial markets,” Mr. Bernanke said. “I also welcome the introduction of the Treasury’s new purchase facility for mortgage-backed securities, which will provide critical support for mortgage markets in this period of unusual credit-market uncertainty.”

The crisis surrounding the mortgage-finance giants seeped into the presidential campaigns, with Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, saying on CBS’s Face the Nation that he supported the Treasury move, but he also implicitly criticized the Bush administration’s oversight. “I think that we’ve got to keep people in their homes. There’s got to be restructuring, there’s got to be reorganization, and there’s got to be some confidence that we’ve stopped this downward spiral,” Mr. McCain said.

“It’s hard, it’s tough, but it’s also the classic example of why we need change in Washington. It’s an example of cronyism, special interest, lobbyists. A quasi-governmental organization, where the executives were making hundreds of ? hundred some billion dollars a year, while things were going downhill, going to hell in a handbasket,” Mr. McCain said, adding that the two companies need “more regulation, more oversight, more transparency, more of everything, and frankly, a dramatic reduction in what they do.”

Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic nominee for vice president, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he spoke to Mr. Paulson last night, and that the Treasury secretary laid out his three principles for the rescue plan. “One, you have to make sure that you help homeowners and stabilize, at the same time, financial institutions. Secondly, you got to make sure that you’re not bailing out shareholders vs. the taxpayers. And the third thing you got to do is make sure that they’re still in a position to be able to continue to lend, because there is a need for them to continue to have this elasticity of being able to deal with the market.

“Now, what I’ve heard the outline of, I am ? I want to wait till I see all the detail, but if it meets those three principles, then I think it has a great chance of succeeding. And as I understand it, whatever proposal Secretary Paulson is going to make is a proposal to get us over this hump of instability and uncertainty. It’s not an official reorganization. It will be left to the next administration and the Congress to make those judgments.

日本経済新聞　2008/9/8

米住宅公社　政府管理に　救済策発表
　公的資金で優先株購入　総枠は2000億ドル　

　ポールソン米財務長官は７日記者会見し、経営難に陥っている連邦住宅抵当公社(ファニーメイ)と連邦住宅貸付抵当公社(フレディマック)を政府の管理下に置くと発表した。２社合計で２千億ドルの優先株購入枠を設定、経営状況に応じ段階的に公的資金を注入する。これを受け両社の経営陣を刷新。株主にも一定の責任を求める。金融システム危機を防ぎ、米経済の悪化に歯止めをかける狙いだ。

金融危機回避を最優先

　信用力の低い個人向け往宅融資(サブプライムローン)問題に端を発した米金融システム不安が昨年夏に表面化してから１年余りたち、公的資金を活用する新たな段階に入った。
　ポールソン長官は「金融市場の安定、住宅金融の円滑化、納税者の保護の３つの観点から、新たな施策を決めた」と語った。バーナンキ米連邦準備理事会(FRB)議長も「今回の決定が住宅市場の強化と金融の安定に貢献するだろう」との声明を発表した。
　２公社への救済策は７月末に成立した住宅公社支援法に基づく。財務省は２社それぞれと総枠１千億ドルずつの優先株の購入協定を結んだ。まず表面配当利回り１０%で、各１０億ドルずつ発行する。不足する場合には、さらに公的資金の注入額を積み増す可能性もある。
　政府は臨時の新型融資制度も創設し、２社の資金調達を支援する。さらに、両社が発行する住宅ローン担保証券も政府が購入。資金繰り安定と経営の改善につなげる。これに伴い、現在の経営者は退任。既存の株主も配当停止や損失処理の際の減資などの形で、株主責任を負う。
　２公社は、約５兆ドルの住宅ローン債権を保有・保証する巨大金融機関。不動産市場低迷を受け損失が拡大、株価も急落するなど経営難が深刻になっていた。米政府は、２公社が破綻すれば内外の金融市場の動揺が激しくなると判断。公的資金注入で、信用不安の収束を図る。
　ポールソン米財務長官は６日までに、大統領選挙の侯補者である民主党のオバマ上院議員、共和党のマケイン上院議員それぞれに２公社の救済策を説明した。経済活動への悪影響を避けるため、両氏ともに救済策をひとまず容認する見通しだ。

米国発危機の連鎖 防ぐ

　米政府が連邦住宅抵当公社(ファニーメイ)と連邦住宅貸付抵当公社(フレディマック)の救済に踏み込んだのは、米国発の金融恐慌を回避するためだ。各国の中央銀行や金融機関は両社が発行する債券を大量に保有しており、両社が資金繰りに行き詰まれば世界的に金融システムが揺らぐ可能性があった。米大統領選を前に、住宅不況と金融不安の連鎖による景気の一段の悪化を防ぐ狙いもあった。

対応、迅速各目立つ
　日本の「10年」、1年強で処理
　債券海外投資家が大量保有

　「両社が破綻すれば革界の金融市場が大混乱に陥る恐れがある」。７日午前に緊急記者会見したポールソン米財務長官は両社の経営不安が世界の金融システムに及ぼす影響に危機感を強調した。
　両社が保有もしくは保証する住宅ローン関連証券は約５兆３千億ドル(約５４０兆円)と日本の国内総生産(GDP)を上回る。各国の金融機関や中央銀行が保有する両社発行の債券や関連商品は約１兆６千億ドル(約１７０兆円)にのぼり、両社の破綻は各国に連鎖する危険があった。
　各国の中央銀行は米連邦準備理事会(FRB)のバーナンキ議長らを通じ、米政府に両社の経営支援を要請していたもよう。市場からも公的資金注入を含む抜本策への圧力が増していた。
　米政府が支援策を急いだもう一つの理由は大統領選だ。米経済は減税果で今年４−６月期に年率3.3%成長を達成したが、住宅市況の下落は底が見えない。８月の米失業率が約５年ぶりに6.1%まで上昇するなど、雇用情勢の悪化にも歯止めがかからない。住宅を差し押さえられる人が増えれば、大統領選や同時に行われる議会選への影響は必至だ。
　ポールソン長官は６日までに共和党のマケイン上院議員、民主党のオバマ上院議員に支援策を説明。「長期かつ深刻な危機を避けるために政府の介入を支持したい」(オバマ氏)などと、両大統領候補から承認を得た。米議会の支持を獲得するため、民主、共和両党の全国大会で両候補が正式指名を受けた直後のタイミングを選んで説明する周到さをみせた。
　米政府は信用力の低い個人向け住宅融資(サブプライムローン)問題が深刻化した昨夏から１年強で、公的資金投入を決断した。日本が１９９０年代初めのバブル崩壊後、住宅金融専門会社の処理を経て、銀行への公的資金の本格注入までほぼ１０年を要したのに比べ、けた違いに速い対応を迫られたのは、市場と経済に及ぼす影響がそれだけ深刻なことを示した。

米経済　テコ入れ効果・不透明　
　住宅市場、なお底見えず
　
　米財務省の住宅公社支援策は金融危機を防ぐのに一定の効果が見込める半面、米経済のてこ入れに果たす役割は不透明だ。住宅市場は販売件数、価格ともに落ち込み続ける局面から抜け出せず、金融面でも不良債権の増大に悩む地域金融機関の破綻が予想される厳しい状況にある。
　ポールソン財務長官は７日の声明で「住宅の調整がおおむね終わるまで、米国の経済と市場は回復しない」と強調した。米住宅投資は２００６年から落ち込み始め、今年４−６月期まで９・四半期連続で２ケタ減を記録。長く経済成長を抑える主因となってきた。
　住宅公社の経営悪化も市場の低迷と無縁でなく、値下がりがきつい物件の保証や融資への関与を広げた結果、損失を膨らませた。公的資金を活用した投融資は信用不安を和らげる見通しだが、公社の事業内容を改革するのは引き続き難題だ。カリフォルニア、フロリダ、ネバダの３州を中心とする住宅バブル崩壊の震源地では物件の大幅な値引きがなお続く。住宅価格の底入れはまだ確認できていない。
　公社を下支えしても、民間金融機関に不安が残る。米連邦預金保険公社(FDIC)のベアー総裁は今月初めに「信用収縮の終了にはほど遠い」との認識を表明。貸し渋りと不良債権の悪循環を止める即効薬は見あたらず、金融界は損失の処理と増資を続ける体力勝負の様相になっている。