"Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte just ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to treat cryptocurrency — a volatile and largely unregulated mess — as an asset when evaluating whether to purchase mortgages from banks.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae support about 70% of the mortgages in the country. They don’t issue loans but instead buy up home loans and package them into mortgage-backed securities, which are then sold to private investors. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae then guarantee payments to those investors if the mortgage holder defaults.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are likely going to have to issue loans to people partly based on their cryptocurrency holdings. So when the cryptocurrency market collapses and homebuyers default on loans, Freddie and Fannie will have to cover the resulting losses."
- Lisa Needham 2025-06-27