Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as creators of and main players in the secondary mortgage market, buy mortgages from lenders and package them into mortgage-backed securities, or MBS. During the housing bubble, Wall Street investment firms bought subprime loans and packaged them into private-label MBS. What was the KEY difference between Fannie and Freddie’s so-called agency MBS and Wall Street’s private-label MBS?

What’s the difference between regulation and supervision?

What is the inherent conflict of interest in how Fannie and Freddie were structured before being put into conservatorship by the federal government in 2008?

Main provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in the wake of Enron, WorldCom et al. that all publically traded firms must abide by do NOT include:

What’s the traditional underwriting process when making a mortgage or other type of loan, whether it’s to a hedge fund or an individual?

Briefly describe the dilemma executives, reporters, and government officials face once they know a financial institution has a problem.

How does a classic Ponzi scheme work?

Fannie and Freddie bought relatively few of toxic subprime loans directly from lenders, but they did provide as much as 40 percent of the financing for these mortgages and, in the process, legitimize them and contribute to the mortgage bubble. How?

Though many factors create bubbles, what is the most essential one, the necessary though not necessarily sufficient ingredient?

Besides the agency that regulates thrifts (which was in the FHLB system and then became the Office of Thrift Supervision within Treasury) and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which we’ll focus on after the midterm), what are the three federal banking regulatory agencies?