Several commenters to my last post wondered why the heck Hank Paulson & Co. think they need to bail out Fannie and Freddie. I'll give Paulson's answer, then translate:

These Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements were made necessary by the ambiguities in the GSE Congressional charters, which have been perceived to indicate government support for agency debt and guaranteed MBS. Our nation has tolerated these ambiguities for too long, and as a result GSE debt and MBS are held by central banks and investors throughout the United States and around the world who believe them to be virtually risk-free. Because the U.S. Government created these ambiguities, we have a responsibility to both avert and ultimately address the systemic risk now posed by the scale and breadth of the holdings of GSE debt and MBS.

GSE=government-sponsored enterprise=Fannie and Freddie; MBS=mortgage-backed securities. And the Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements are the deals Treasury got in return for committing up to $200 billion to keep the two companies solvent.

The issue is that, even though every debt security issued by Fannie and Freddie included the disclaimer that it wasn't guaranteed by the U.S. government, investors around the world assumed they were guaranteed. And neither Congress nor the Treasury nor the Federal Reserve did anything to disabuse them of that notion. Just the opposite, in fact--the Fed seems to have actively steered foreign central banks into GSE securities.

So the fear is that if Fannie and Freddie were allowed to default on any of their commitments

a) financing for mortgages in the U.S. would almost entirely dry up, for a little while at least

and, even worse,

b) the U.S. government would be seen as welshing on its commitments--meaning that investors would start demanding much higher interest rates on Treasury securities.

Can someone explain why the government created companies that are now run by private shareholders? I'm having trouble understanding what the advantage is. Taxpayers are still clearly at risk so it seems that the shareholders can capitalize and then, should something go wrong, taxpayers will have to bail them out. Wouldn't it be better to have these institutions run by the government entirely?

Those excellent questions about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were asked Saturday by commenter Justin C. This (Sunday) morning, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James Lockhart officially unveiled their answer to the last one. Yes, they effectively said, it would be better to have the two giant mortgage lenders run by the government--at least for now.

I bailed out Freddie Mac, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

"Government support needs to be either explicit or non-existent," Paulson said today. Through the end of 2009, at least, it's going to be explicit. The FHFA has taken over the two companies as a conservator, and Treasury has entered into contracts in which it pledges to keep Fannie and Freddie solvent and they in turn give Treasury the right to acquire up to 79.9% of their common stock for a nominal fee. Treasury also committed to buy lots of the companies' mortgage-backed securities for the next couple of years, which should keep mortgage rates down. Both companies will be getting new CEOs (former Merrill Lyncher and TIAA-CREFer Herb Allison at Fannie and former U.S. Bancorper David Moffett at Freddie) and are suspending all dividend payments, but their common and preferred stock will continue to trade.

(More after the break.)

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