UCLA Luskin Professor Wesley Yin wrote a Fortune op-ed titled “Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the wrong way risks a second Great Recession.”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that play a major role in the U.S. housing market by purchasing qualifying mortgages from lenders and bundling them into mortgage-backed securities, helping keep borrowing costs lower and credit accessible for homebuyers. The Trump administration has signaled that reprivatization could begin as early as the second quarter of 2026.
Yin, a professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin with a joint appointment at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, warns that the current approach lacks transparency and could dismantle critical safeguards established after the 2008 financial crisis. “A hasty insider-driven IPO and exit from conservatorship will erode the safeguards that have kept the housing market stable, exacerbate systemic risks, and primarily enrich shareholders,” he says. “Such a move would align with the Administration’s agenda of rolling back other financial regulations and oversight.”
Rather than improving affordability, Yin argues that it would instead benefit wealthy investors and increase borrowing costs, potentially encouraging the type of risk-taking that contributed to the Great Recession.
