hen do the words “not guaranteed” actually mean “guaranteed”? Whenever the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are involved. The two companies have long been required to tell investors that their securities are not guaranteed by the federal government. But in the financial markets everyone has always assumed that this demurral was just window-dressing, and everyone, it turns out, was right. Last week, when fears of a possible collapse of the two companies threatened to spark a major financial crisis, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve quickly came up with a rescue package. What had been an implicit guarantee became an explicit one.
Fannie and Freddie are the duck-billed platypuses of the financial world. They’re profit-driven corporations, owned by shareholders and, in theory, beholden only to them. But they’re also so-called “government-sponsored enterprises,” set up by the state with the explicit mission of fostering homeownership, by buying and selling home mortgages. Unlike ordinary corporations, they’re exempt from most state and local taxes and certain S.E.C. requirements, and they have access to a government credit line. Other G.S.E.s play similar roles in other markets: the Federal Home Loan Banks make loans to banks, credit unions, and thrifts; the Farm Credit Banks facilitate the flow of credit to farmers; and Farmer Mac buys up farm and rural-housing mortgages. In each case, the government saw a hole in the marketplace and chartered a company to fill it.
The G.S.E.s are curious, because there’s no obvious reason for them to exist in the form they do: instead of creating private companies to do all these jobs, the government could just do them itself. In fact, that’s how Fannie Mae got started, back in 1938: originally, it was a government agency endowed with the authority to buy mortgages, in the hope that this would expand the supply of credit to homeowners. It wasn’t until 1968 that Fannie was privatized. (Freddie Mac was created two years later, and was private from the start.) The main reason for the change was surprisingly mundane: accounting. At the time, Lyndon Johnson was concerned about the effect of the Vietnam War on the federal budget. Making Fannie Mae private moved its liabilities off the government’s books, even if, as the recent crisis made clear, the U.S. was still responsible for those debts. It was a bit like what Enron did thirty years later, when it used “special-purpose entities” to move liabilities off its balance sheet.
Making Fannie and Freddie into these weird hybrids may have spruced up the budget, but in the long run it also made it easy for the companies to grow too big, too fast. Because everyone assumed that the government would make good on Fannie’s and Freddie’s debts, they could borrow money more cheaply than their competitors. They used this cheap debt to increase the number of mortgages they bought. Had Fannie and Freddie been ordinary private companies, there would have been a natural check: companies with more debt are usually seen as riskier, and that makes shareholders and bondholders less willing to invest in them. Or, had Fannie and Freddie been government agencies, budget constraints would likely have limited the scope of their lending. Since neither the market nor the state checked their growth, they were able to swell extravagantly. (Regulators might have reined the companies in, but, thanks in part to ardent lobbying by Fannie and Freddie, Congress failed to provide them with sufficient power to do so.)
The result of all this was that the companies reaped the rewards of the private sector while enjoying the security of the public sector. Seemingly insulated from all harm, they became reckless. They constructed a giant pyramid of debt on a very small base of capital (eighty-one billion dollars, by the most recent publicly available figures), and by May, 2008, either owned or guaranteed more than five trillion dollars in mortgages. As a result, even though just a small percentage of Fannie’s and Freddie’s mortgages are delinquent, the potential losses are huge. That’s why, in recent weeks, investors finally lost faith in them.
Whatever their sins, Fannie and Freddie clearly couldn’t be allowed to fail, but that’s no argument for letting them go on as they are. Either they should be forced to make it as private companies or they should be nationalized. Given that their business depends on the promise of government assistance and that their current state remains woeful (despite an upturn in their fortunes late last week), nationalization seems more sensible. If Fannie and Freddie are going to run up a tab and stick taxpayers with the bill, why should shareholders profit?
Beyond that question, though, is a more important one: Do we need Fannie and Freddie at all? Their supposed reason for being is that their ability to borrow money at low rates lowers borrowing costs for homeowners. But a paper by the economist Wayne Passmore, of the Federal Reserve, suggests that in fact Fannie and Freddie have only a small effect on the interest rates that homeowners pay, saving them less than one-tenth of a percentage point. More important, if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that homeownership is not an unalloyed economic good, and that we should be cautious about using gimmicks to make it more attractive. The government already offers homeowners a subsidy, in the form of a mortgage tax break. Given everything else we could be spending taxpayer money on, does the government really need to be in the mortgage-buying business, too? ♦
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译文:
为赞助鲁莽买单【纽约客】
作者： James Surowiecki
日期： 2008年7月28日
出处：《纽约客》
每当房贷抵押巨头房利美（Fannie Mae）和房地美（Freddie Mac）卷进来的时候，“没有保证”这样的表态何时才能在实际上意味着“有保证”?长期以来，这两家公司被要求告知他们的投资者，“双房”的股票并没有联邦政府的保证。但在金融市场，每个人都始终认为这种撇清只是装装样子。最后事实也证明了每个人都对了。上周，因为双房可能倒闭带来的恐慌威胁到发生一场重大金融危机，财政部及美联储立即推出了一系列拯救方案。最终，暧昧的“保证”也最终成为明显的“保证”。
房利美和房地美是美国金融界的鸭嘴兽。他们是利润驱动的公司，为股东所有，而且，从理论上说，也只为他们负责。“双房”也被称作政府支持型企业(GSE),“双房”之所以建立是缘于联邦通过购买及出售住房抵押索取权鼓励住房发展的直接诉求。和普通的公司不同，他们不用缴纳联邦及各州大部分的税收，也不需要满足SEC所有要求，而且“双房”可以使用政府的给予“最高额度的赊权”（credit line)。还有其他政府支持型企业在其他市场扮演着相同的角色：例如联邦房贷银行(Federal Home Loan Banks) 向银行、贷款单位（credit union），以及存借机构（thrift）发放贷款；联邦农业信贷银行推动大笔贷款涌向农民；以及联邦农业抵押公司（Farmer Mac)全部买下农场和郊外住宅抵押索取权。这些企业的建立，都是因为政府在市场中发现漏洞，然后特许一个企业去弥补这个漏洞。
这些政府支持型企业有些古怪的，因为没有明显的理由让他们之所以成为现在这样：政府原本可以不去建立私有公司弥补这些漏洞，而选择自己独立完成。事实上，这也是房地美如何在1938年起步的：本来，它只是一家政府代理机构，然后被授予购买抵押索取权的权力，借此政府希望向更多的买房人扩大信贷渠道。直到1968年，房利美才私有化。（房地美在两年后成立，并且一开始就是私有的。）这种变化背后的诱因实在令人惊讶的平淡无奇：出于会计因素。在那时候，美国总统林登·约翰逊非常关心越南战争会在政府预算上产生什么样的影响。让房利美私有化就可以使债务消失在政府的账本上，即便如此，随着目前危机的发展，还是让一切明朗化——美国仍然为这些债务负责。这有点类似于30年后的安然，使用“特殊目的机构”这一项将债务从资产负债表上隐去。
让“双房”变成这样奇特的混合体可能让财政预算看起来漂亮一点，但从长期看，这些企业因此成长得太快，太大。每个人都会认为政府会补偿房利美和房地美的债务，“双房”可以比其竞争对手拿到更便宜的贷款。他们用这种廉价的资金来加大购买抵押索取权。如果“双房”是普通的私有公司，他们自然而然会被审视：背负更多债务的公司被视作更有风险，因此股东和债券持有人不会像现在这样愿意投资他们。或者，要是“双房”是政府代理机构，政府预算的限定很可能限制他们借贷的规模。但无论是市场还是国家都没有去反思他们的壮大，他们最终无度地膨胀起来。（监管者也许曾把“双房”纳入监管范围，不过，“双房”强大的游说力量让国会最终没给于监管机构足够的全权力。）
这一切的结果就是，这两家公享受着公众的恩惠而中饱私囊。这种与伤害绝缘的待遇，让他们变得相当鲁莽。他们在极小的资金基础上建立起一个巨大的债务金字塔（根据最新公开数字为810亿美元）。截至2008年5月，“双房”拥有或者有保证的抵押索取权价值多于5万亿美元。因此，即使是一小部分“双房”的抵押权违约，潜在的损失将是巨大的。这就是为何投资者在近几周对“双房”丧失了信心。
不管它们造了什么孽，“双房”很明显不能被允许倒下，但无可辩驳的是，再也不能让它们像现时这样风光下去了。要么“双房”被强制真正私有化，要么国有化。鉴于“双房”业务依赖政府的帮助，加之“双房”目前状况仍然不堪，（先不管上周末“双房”财务有所好转），国有化看起来更有道理。如果“双房”不断地花钱。还盯着纳税人买单，股东还凭什么能得利？
除了这个，还有一个更重要的问题：我们真的需要“双房”吗？“双房”存在是因为他们有能力以更低的利息获得资金，进而降低买房人的成本。但是，美联储经济学家 Wayne Passmore在一份报告中指出，事实上，“双房”在降低买房人还贷利息上只能产生很小的作用，节省下来的费用少于0.1个百分点。而且，如果过去几年真的教会我们什么的话，那就是，房屋拥有权并不是一个纯粹的经济商品，我们应该慎用技巧让其具备不恰当的吸引力。政府已经提供买房人抵押贷款税收上的减免。还有其他许多事务需要纳税人掏腰包，政府是否真的还要进入抵押索取权购买业务？
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