A senior U.S. Treasury official on Friday rejected proposals to recapitalize class="mandelbrot_refrag">Fannie Mae and class="mandelbrot_refrag">Freddie Mac, saying it would take at least 20 years to make sure they were adequately funded and that in the meantime taxpayers would potentially be on the hook.
_0">In remarks prepared for delivery to a housing conference, Treasury Under Secretary Mary Miller repeated the Obama administration's call for winding down the two government-controlled mortgage class="mandelbrot_refrag">finance firms.
"Critics of reform would suggest that we can simply recapitalize the GSEs and avoid difficult decisions around creating a new system," she said. "Even if truly rehabilitating the GSEs were possible, recapitalizing them adequately would take at least 20 years." (Reporting by Timothy Ahmann; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)