What if you bought Fannie Mae in 2000?
US Finance · Mortgages. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.1× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Fannie Mae at the start of 2000 would be worth about $129 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise created in the 1930s and later privatized: it buys mortgages from lenders, packages them into securities and guarantees them. For decades it enjoyed the best of both worlds, a private company with shareholders and an implicit government backstop that let it borrow cheaply. In 2000 it was a blue-chip stock; an accounting scandal in 2004 cost its chief executive his job but did little to dent its reach.
The 2008 housing crash broke the model. With losses mounting on the mortgages it guaranteed, the government placed Fannie Mae into conservatorship in September 2008 and injected huge sums of capital. The common shares were later delisted to the over-the-counter market, and in 2012 the Treasury changed the terms of its rescue so that essentially all of Fannie's profits flowed to the government, a move litigated for years. The stock became a speculative bet on politics: rising when talk turned to releasing the company from conservatorship, as it did again in 2025, and falling when those hopes faded.
The lesson: When a business's fate depends on a government decision rather than its own operations, the stock becomes a political wager, not an investment in earnings.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $62.00 | $129 | $4,626 | 0.1× |
| 2003 | $64.00 | $125 | $7,727 | 0.1× |
| 2005 | $71.00 | $113 | $5,763 | 0.1× |
| 2007 | $59.00 | $136 | $4,789 | 0.1× |
| 2008 | $40.00 | $200 | $4,626 | 0.2× |
| 2010 | $1.00 | $8,000 | $6,071 | 8.0× |
| 2012 | $0.25 | $32,000 | $5,312 | 32.0× |
| 2015 | $2.40 | $3,333 | $3,301 | 3.3× |
| 2018 | $2.60 | $3,077 | $2,519 | 3.1× |
| 2020 | $3.30 | $2,424 | $2,092 | 2.4× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2012, turning $1,000 into $32,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,312.
On this day
- 13 July 2008: Paulson asks for powers to rescue Fannie and Freddie
- 7 September 2008: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over
- 25 November 2008: The Fed launches what became QE1
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Fannie Mae is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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