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Debt-ridden US mortgage funders 'could bring down Aust economy'
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them have more than $5 trillion in debt, and their collapse would devastate the US economy and have serious consequences for Australia.
The Bush administration has been forced to throw a lifeline to the two companies, which underwrite half of America's beleaguered housing market.
Last night, Freddie Mac sought to raise capital by selling more than $3 billion in short-term debt to investors.
Buyers showed no hesitation in bidding on Freddie Mac's sale, just hours after the US Government pledged support for the nation's top mortgage finance agencies.
But Kumar Palghat from Kapstream Capital says the steps have failed to stem growing alarm on Wall Street.
"Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae finance about half of the mortgages in the US, so failure of either one of the organisations will have a catastrophic result for the US economy," he said.
"So the Government had to step in and say or do something, which is what they're doing, similar to what they did with Bear Stearns in March."
The selling process
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are privately owned but mandated by the US Congress to provide funding for the mortgage industry.
Their names are acronyms: Fannie Mae stands for the Federal National Mortgage Association and Freddie Mac is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.
How they operate is that when customers borrow money from a bank to buy their home, the bank sells that mortgage to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, which means the bank then has more money to lend.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae then bundle up all those loans and sell them on to investors.
But a combination of the dramatic fall in US house prices, coupled with the turmoil on credit markets, has investors shying away from those securitised loans.
"If they can't sell those mortgages, all of a sudden they're sitting on a lot of mortgages on their books," Mr Palghat said.
"You're talking about half the US mortgage market here and a default somewhere along the line will be pretty bad."
Government rescue plan
Which is why US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson has stepped in with a rescue plan which could run to hundreds of billions of dollars.
It includes an increased line of credit from Treasury, a commitment for the US Treasury to buy shares in both companies, and a promise of tougher laws covering capital requirements and other prudential standards.
For US politicians, an election year is the worst possible time for institutions as large as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to be on the brink.
Fairfax Media's Bruce Wolpe is a former adviser to the Democratic Party. He says both presidential candidates - Barack Obama and his rival John McCain - know they could both be badly damaged if the two lenders do not survive.
"When you have institutions as large as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac kind of on the brink where the President and the Congress have to step up to save it, that brings back the 1930s and very uneasy feelings about the future direction of the American economy," Mr Wolpe said.
The situation has not been helped by the fact that California-based subprime mortgage lender Indymac was place in receivership over the weekend, the fifth US bank to fail this year amid predictions it will not be the last.
Ripple effect
However, it is Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that economies around the world are watching, with AMP Capital Investors' Shane Oliver believing the implications of their collapse for Australia could be severe.
"If the US were to go into a serious recession, and certainly the collapse of these enterprises could cause that, it would really drag down the Chinese economy, which would then have a direct flow-back to Australia via lower commodity prices and less demand for our exports," Mr Oliver said.
But while the Bush administration is trying to prevent the total meltdown of the already depressed US housing markets and the damage that would do to the US and global economies, there is another sign of the increasing slowdown of the Australian economy.
Figures from the Bureau of Statistics show personal lending has fallen another 8 per cent as higher petrol prices and higher interest rates take their toll.
Mr Oliver says the numbers confirm his belief the Reserve Bank has raised interest rates too far.
"I didn't think they needed to raise interest rates back in February and March, given the slowdown we were seeing globally, and given the credit crunch," he said.
"Unfortunately we did get those two rate hikes and of course we're seeing interest rate increases piled on top of interest rate increases at the hands of the banks."
This is why Mr Oliver thinks Australia, like the US, may also be heading for recession. |
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