Add Your Photos and Video to This Story

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac: Where'd those names come from?

by mtippett | July 22, 2008 at 02:53 pm | 454 views | 2 comments

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been in the news recently as the US financial crisis continues. I've always wondered where those unexplicable names came from and today I decided to find out. Here's what Wikipedia had to say:

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) (NYSE: FNM), commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) of the United States federal government. It is a shareholder-owned corporation authorized to make loans and loan guarantees.
It is the leading market-maker in the U.S. secondary mortgage market, which helps to replenish the supply money for mortgages and enables money to be available for housing purchases. As of 2008, Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) own or guarantee about half of the U.S.'s $12 trillion mortgage market.[7] As a result, the corporations were affected particularly hard by the subprime mortgage crisis in late 2007 and early 2008.

The name "Fannie Mae" is a creative pronunciation of the company's initialism that has been adopted officially for ease of identification. It is more than an informal nickname; FNMA refers to itself by this name.