Bill Ackman’s new Fannie-Freddie plan has huge “May I meet you?” energy. He’s basically proposing a trillion-dollar restructuring of U.S. housing finance like he’s asking Treasury out for coffee at Equinox.

Ackman jumped on X Tuesday w/ a proposal that would drag Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac out of their 16-year conservatorship purgatory w/o the giant, messy IPO the Trump people are pushing. Ackman says an IPO or a forced Fannie–Freddie merger is “neither feasible nor desirable” anytime soon. Instead, he’s pitching a simpler, potentially faster path to privatization. Plz don’t mistake it for altruism; his hedge fund is the largest private-sector shareholder in the GSEs. Here’s the TLDR:

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1) Finally admit that the GSEs have already repaid the bailout! Ackman argues that between the 10% dividend on the senior preferreds & the decade-long Net Worth Sweep, Treasury has been made whole & then some. His view is that they should clean up the balance sheet & mark the senior preferred stock as repaid.
 
2) Treasury exercises its 79.9% warrants. Let taxpayers (*cough* hedge funds?) take the equity they were promised in ‘08. Ackman estimates the combined companies could be worth ~$400B once recapitalized, giving Treasury a ~$300B stake on paper. 

3) Uplist to the NYSE instead of doing an IPO. Rather than selling new shares or merging the twins, he wants to relist Fannie & Freddie on the NYSE, which he says can be done in weeks once the capital structure is fixed. That would broaden the shareholder base & give the market real price discovery again. Then the government sells down slooooowly, which would prevent a mortgage spread blowout. 

He also wants to loosen the capital constraints (goodbye 4.5% capital requirement on guarantee book). Keep in mind Ackman also changed his tune by saying Fannie & Freddie shouldn’t merge. He was for it before he was against it. 

Ackman said he'd already discussed the plan w/ Trump, Bessent, Lutnick & Pulte, so the question is really whether Treasury agrees w/ the premise that senior preferred shares should be forgiven. 

“Fannie and Freddie meet NYSE listing requirements – shares outstanding, number of holders, earnings test, financial reporting, etc.,” said Compass Point analyst Ed Groshans, per Bloomberg. “Ackman’s comment that NYSE can be ready to list the GSEs in a matter of weeks appears to be reasonable.” The exchange is “deeper and more liquid, with more controls over bid-ask spreads,” he added. “Those factors should improve trading and pricing for all investors.”

There goes another one. Onity Group/PHH announced Tuesday that it is getting out of the reverse origination game. Instead, they’ll sell MSRs on reverse mortgages to Finance of America Reverse. Per SEC filings, FoA will acquire HECM MSRs w/ a UPB of $9.6B & Onity will subservice them for at least 3 years. If you’re like me, you immediately thought: Hmm…how much is that worth? Onity said they’ll get $189M in cash for the deal.

I understand that the reverse mortgage space is a tough sell given the fraught history. But given how much equity Americans have & the demographics of those homeowners (boomers), it surprises me how few believe this is a viable marketplace. It’s basically now FOA, Mutual of Omaha, Longbridge & a couple IMBs sinking modest resources into it?

Rich Swerbinsky crunched some numbers on who’s been growing market share in ‘25 using iEmergent. “I looked at the top 300 lenders in America. 2024 closed loan unit market share vs 2025 YTD,” he wrote. “When volume dries up, real operators show up. These lenders didn't treat 2025 like a reset, they treated it like a launchpad.”

The top 10 gainers were: 

For most of the past 30 years, it simply hasn’t made any financial sense out for small- & mid-sized lenders to build their own tech. Instead, they’d sign multi-year deals w/ a host of vendors. LOS, CRM, POS, etc. They routinely spend millions on their tech stacks, despite most of their workforce only using a handful of tools.

But if you talk to the people running some of these shops, there’s a feeling that we…