NEW YORK (Fortune) -- They own or guarantee $5 trillion worth of mortgages - nearly half of all the country's outstanding home loan debt - and they're crashing. But not everybody is convinced they should be.
{xtypo_quote_left} "Nobody every believed that Fannie and Freddie were truly private and they never should have been," says Whalen. "Now we will all have to pay for a company that has gone astray." {/xtypo_quote_left}
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are struggling with an investor loss of confidence so great that, while they're unlikely to go under, they could conceivably see their ability to function impaired. That would wreak yet more havoc on an already wrecked housing market - making loans tougher to come by and possibly pushing hundreds of billions of dollars in cost onto U.S. taxpayers.
The extent of their troubles is in debate. Several analysts and a former Federal Reserve governor have said the two companies desperately need to raise money to continue their business of buying and guaranteeing home mortgages.
Others, including Fannie and Freddie, their regulators, some Wall Street analysts, and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D - Conn., the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, have defended the strength of the two companies.
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