Freddie Mac CEO Walks After Six Months

Freddie Mac CEO David Moffett came on board when the government took over Freddie and Fannie on September 6, 2008. Now he’s leaving the company as they ready to announce their six straight quarterly loss and ask Treasury for more money—Treasury last week said they’d allocate $200b to Fannie and Freddie:

Freddie reiterated today that it may ask for $30 billion to $35 billion in Treasury capital as the company, along with larger competitor Fannie Mae, struggle with deteriorating credit quality. Freddie, which has reported about $30 billion in losses over five quarters, may have troubles that run deeper than Moffett assessed when he took the job in September, said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia.

…Freddie and Washington-based Fannie are the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, owning or guaranteeing about $5.3 trillion of the $12 trillion residential mortgage market.

Fannie last week asked the Treasury for $15.2 billion in capital and raised the possibility of requesting more after posting a $25.2 billion fourth-quarter net loss as it wrote down the value of its assets. Fannie said the market conditions that contributed to the loss will “continue and possibly worsen.”

…Moffett, a former Carlyle Group executive who was once vice chairman of U.S. Bancorp, “does not have a position lined up at this time” with another company, a Freddie spokeswoman, Sharon McHale, said in a telephone interview.