STEPHEN MOORE: We Won’t Be Fooled Again, Fannie Mae

Anyone remember back in 2008 when the housing market collapsed and the stock market crashed with many tens of millions of Americans seeing their lifetime savings nearly wiped out?

Apparently the politicians in Washington are suffering amnesia – even though it was the worst crash since the Great Depression.

What else has been conveniently forgotten inside the swamp is that the institution that lost the most money and required the biggest taxpayer out wasn’t any of the major banks that teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, but Fannie Mae – the government-guaranteed enterprise that insures federal mortgages and was supposed to NEVER fail. Fanny received nearly $200 billion of taxpayer rescue funds.

Fannie Mae, which now resides in one of the glitziest near-one million square foot high-story office buildings in the Washington D.C. area, is still in conservatorship. Hopefully, the Trump administration will move toward setting it free and severing all its federal strings.

Instead, Fannie and the housing lobby wants to expand its power by forcing taxpayers to take on tens of billions of dollars of new risk by effectively eliminating title insurance on federally-backed loans and replacing it with… ta da: Fannie Mae as the de facto insurance provider on hundreds of billions of dollars of homes. What could possibly go wrong?