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#243: The Frankenstein Mortgage

#243: The Frankenstein Mortgage

Planet Money vor 15 Jahren

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The 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage -- the bedrock of American home ownership -- is a weird loan.

In an ordinary market, you'd have to pay a really high interest rate to get a 30-year fixed, if you could get it at all. Only the intervention of the government -- and the creation of Fannie Mae -- turned the loan into America's plain-vanilla mortgage.

On today's Planet Money, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (authors of All the Devils Are Here, a book on the financial crisis) walk us through the 30-year-fixed and the history of Fannie and Freddie. And they talk about where we go from here.