Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the debacle of mortgage finance

In this audio from VoxEU.org Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson talk to Viv Davies about their recent book ‘Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance’. Originally set up as government sponsored enterprises, the financial collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to a massive government intervention that has already cost US taxpayers around $150 billion. The authors discuss their analysis of how these institutions collapsed, why housing finance in the US is broken and what now needs to be done to reform the system.