Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

By the 1990s, Fannie’s chief executive could boast, without much exaggeration, that “we are the equivalent of a Federal Reserve system for housing.” At their pinnacle the two mortgage giants—neither of them an originator of loans—owned or guaranteed some 55 percent of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market.