Taxpayers are about to earn a return on their investment in Fannie Mae.
In a statement on its annual earnings report, the mortgage giant said that it will have paid a total of $121.1 billion in dividends to the Treasury as of March 2014, $5 billion more than the total assistance it drew from the Treasury to stay afloat during the housing crisis.
The company will hand over $7.2 billion in dividends to the Treasury in March, according to the company’s annual earnings report. Fannie Mae said in the report that it earned a $6.5 billion profit in the fourth quarter of 2013 and $84 billion in profit for all of 2013.
Despite the fact that it will have paid more to the Treasury than it’s received in assistance, Fannie Mae will not have technically paid back any of the assistance. That’s because changes made to the government’s stock agreement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2012 require the companies to pay virtually all their profits as dividends to the government, and those dividends don’t count towards paying down the assistance.
Those changes also prevent Fannie Mae from handing over any of their profits to investors besides the government. Some investors have reacted to the changes by suing the government.
Source: Fannie Mae
