Fannie and Freddie

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these had been created by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-​market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007 – 2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”