On-Money

 The U.S. government is planning to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Sunday, September 7 and all shareholders of the two mortgage giants will lose out. 

This is expected to be announced later today, and is believed to be possibly the largest financial bailout in the nation’s history, in an attempt to prevent further damage to a housing market experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The government will run the two companies suggesting that the chief executives would be removed. The two government-sponsored enterprises were sent a letter by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that detailed problems at the companies and said why the federal government was taking control.

The two companies own or guarantee almost half of the country’s $12 trillion in home mortgage debt and being placed in receivership would be a major blow to the administration and likely to have adverse effects on the dollar as well as confidence in the administration. A bailout would avoid the more onerous step of being placed in a receivership in the interests of debtholders.

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Charles Bean, the Bank of England’s deputy governor warned that the downturn was as bad as in the 1970s and that everytime things looked up as if they were going to improve, a setback occurred. At Christmas 2007 he said that he had thought that things were past the worst but since then things had deteriorated.

He predicts that if the oil prices stabilised, along with credit markets then growth should pick up and inflation start to fall. And he suggested that the current UK standstill in growth was only temporary.

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