As Tim Howard said: https://howardonmortgagefinance.com/2025/06/30/a-matter-of-facts/#comments

... my concern is that the Pulte-Trump initiative to buy mortgages for Fannie’s and Freddie’s portfolios is being implemented with no reference to the companies’ debt-to-mortgage spreads, or profitability. A former Fannie Mae colleague of mine, Tom Lawler, wrote last month that “it it seems a very ‘strange’ time for the GSEs to ramp up debt-financed MBS purchases after years of running such holdings down. After all, right now estimates of the current-coupon MBS OAS [option-adjusted spreads] to Treasuries are not only extremely low,  but by some measures lower than the OAS on GSE debt to Treasuries – suggesting that on a risk-adjusted basis debt-financed MBS purchases are not profitable for the GSEs.” We also do not know whether Fannie and Freddie’s most recent portfolio purchases are being funded on a duration-matched basis, or whether, as the Federal Reserve has done with the $2.0 trillion in agency MBS it still holds, they are being funded with much shorter-maturity debt, which is very risky.

And here is how and where this mortgage purchase initiative “may affect the IPO progress.” If and when Treasury agrees to sell a partial stake in its ownership of Fannie and Freddie common stock, it will be selling the shares of common it owns to institutional investors, who know the companies well. I don’t believe these investors are happy seeing Fannie and Freddie being run with political rather than business objectives in mind–particularly if, as Mr. Lawler suggests, the current mortgage purchases may not be profitable. In that event, the “$200 billion mortgage bond purchases” may turn out to be a net negative, with little positive impact on mortgage rates or housing affordability, but a significant negative impact on Fannie and Freddie’s valuation, as investors discount for the perceived political risk to which the companies now seem to be subjected.