Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said Monday that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could go public by the end of the year.
Pulte wrote on X that the two government enterprises have been run like businesses under the Trump administration.
“Combined, Freddie and Fannie have over $7 trillion of assets on their balance sheets,” Pulte said. “We are focused on running them like a business and taking out costs so I don’t think there’s any limit to what they could be worth one day.”
President Donald Trump has long considered making both mortgage finance firms public but was unsuccessful in his first term.
Pulte said the president made a correct call.
“President Trump made the right decision not to take Freddie and Fannie public during his first term and is opportunistically evaluating an offering this time around, which could be as early as the end of 2025,” Pulte said.
Trump met in August with top U.S. bank executives to discuss his administration’s plans to privatize the finance firms.
Fannie and Freddie, which operate as for-profit corporations with private shareholders, were created by Congress to expand the national home lending market by buying home loans from private lenders and repackaging them as mortgage-backed securities.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together guarantee more than half the country’s mortgages.
When the housing market collapsed in 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac suffered overwhelming losses. To avoid catastrophic effects for the U.S. economy, they were placed in conservatorship under the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency.
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