All The Devils Are Here: Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World by Joe Nocera, Bethany McLean

programs like Countrywide’s were small and highly controlled—experiments, really, and valid ones at that, because they sought an answer to an important question. As Dan Mudd would later ask, “Do you want to live in a country where someone who has a blemish on their credit, or someone who happens to be a minority, can’t get a home? Where do you draw the line?”
    Mostly, though, Fannie Mae made no apologies for its stance. “I used to say that the goal at Fannie was to have a seamless yes to anyone who wants to do anything for housing,” Johnson later said. “But we didn’t say yes to crap, to fraud. We were probing the boundaries, but it was carefully circumscribed.”
    Says a former Fannie executive: “About 98 percent of our mortgages were done at market rates. We were giving away a little at the edge of the big machine.” This person adds: “Johnson’s attitude was, ‘I am not going to let the government define what affordable housing is to this company.’ ”
    That would soon begin to change, however. In 1999, Andrew Cuomo, who had been appointed HUD secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term and was a true believer in affordable housing, proposed increasing the affordable housing goals. To an unusual degree, Cuomo was immune to Fannie’s charms and impervious to its threats. He’d already taken on Johnson on another issue, and did not back down when Fannie pushed back. In July 1999, the GSEs agreed that by 2001, 50 percent of the mortgages they guaranteed would be loans made to low- or middle-income Americans. One way the GSEs could meet those goals, of course, was by lowering their underwriting standards, just as the subprime industry had done. Indeed, the housers at Fannie had high hopes that their company could serve as the sheriff in the lawless world of subprime lending. An exhaustive study Fannie had done revealed that many subprime borrowers were so fearful of being rejected that they were willing to pay very high rates just to hear a yes. Some studies showed that plenty of subprime customers could have qualified for a prime loan—meaning they were paying far more for their mortgages than they had to. Fannie said it could use its clout to make sure that borrowers got a fair deal.
    Later, many conservative critics of the GSEs would come to see this moment as the capitulation of Fannie and Freddie to the Clinton affordable housing drive. That wasn’t really true. The real reason Fannie was willing tofinally move into riskier territory was the same reason Countrywide did: profits. Subprime was taking off—and the GSEs were sitting on the sidelines. “Their motivation to enter this market is to continue a phenomenal record of amazing shareholder enrichment,” Anne Canfield, a longtime critic of the GSEs, wrote at the time. There was another potential issue, too. At a congressional hearing in June of 2000, the Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ, in Washington, D.C., who also claimed that the GSEs were entering the subprime business to “maximize returns,” said, “The real fear here is that when the economy goes south, or just through one of those cycles it periodically goes through, if Fannie and Freddie are engaged in these subprime markets, then they will get left holding the bag, and the American taxpayer with them.”
    Says a former Fannie executive: “It met our business goals. You have to start there. All the criticisms about Fannie being too shareholder driven and too profit driven—they are true! Shareholders were an important constituency at Fannie. For the smart people we brought in, they were the only constituency.”
    Still, Fannie moved cautiously. In 2000, it put out guidelines listing what sort of riskier loans it would buy; Cuomo used those guidelines in Fannie’s affordable housing goals. Under the new rules, certain kinds of high-risk loans, ones that consumer advocates felt took undue advantage of borrowers,