The for-cause provision has been front and center in a case currently before the Fifth Circuit...

Former Fannie Mae CFO Tim Howard says there is no economic reason the GSEs should hold capital comparable to large commercial banks. “Fannie and Freddie are not multi-product and multinational lenders. They are mono-line insurance companies, limited to a single asset type – residential mortgages – whose historical credit loss performance has been dramatically better than banks.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin itemized some of the other SIFI-like characteristics of Fannie and Freddie: “They have enormous leverage. I have no idea what the right number is, but it’s beyond any reasonable measure of leverage. And they’re heavily interconnected.”