Freddie Mac

To provide competition for the newly privatized Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac buys mortgages in the secondary mortgage market, pools them, and sells them as mortgage-backed securities to investors. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae also own large portfolios of their own of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Chartered by Congress in 1970, Freddie Mac was made a listed public company in 1989. Facing insolvency, Freddie Mac was put into conservatorship by the U.S. government in September 2008.