President Donald Trump posted an intriguing image to his Truth Social account on Saturday.
Apparently generated by artificial intelligence, the image shows a likeness of Trump standing above the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) bell and applauding. On one side of the president reads the words “The Great American Mortgage Corporation.” On the other is presumably a ticker symbol, “MAGA,” with November 2025 printed above.
Based on last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the administration is planning an initial public offering of government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implications of Trump’s social media post are clear: Not only was the Journal’s anonymously sourced reporting accurate, but Trump envisions an IPO by year-end of a single merged company.
Officials in the Trump orbit were quick to seize on the news. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick simply reposted the image on X. Bill Pulte, who oversees Fannie and Freddie as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), posted a screen grab of the makeshift Great American Mortgage Corp. logo with the comment, “FDR created Fannie Mae in 1938 and President Trump may create this in 2025.”
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who founded Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004, also reposted the Trump image on X, commenting that he believes a merger of Fannie and Freddie would result in reduced mortgage rates.
“A merger would enable them to achieve huge synergies both in their operations and in the trading price and spreads of their [mortgage-backed securities], savings which could be passed along to consumers in the form of reduced mortgage rates,” Ackman wrote. “A merger would also reduce the cost and risks of government oversight as there would be only one institution that would require FHFA oversight.”
Fannie and Freddie buy loans that meet their underwriting criteria and package them as mortgage-backed securities that are sold to investors in a process that creates liquidity for lenders. Following the subprime mortgage meltdown and ensuing 2008 financial crisis, the publicly traded companies were bailed out by the Treasury Department, placed under federal conservatorship, and delisted from the NYSE and relegated to the over-the-counter Pink Sheets.
An IPO, which the Journal reported could raise around $30 billion by offering between 5% and 15% of Fannie and Freddie’s stock as a public float, would mark the first time the companies have traded on a major exchange since 2010.
Ackman, it should be noted, would stand to profit if Fannie and Freddie are taken public. Pershing Square owns about 220 million shares of the two companies, according to comments Ackman made during a Pershing earnings call in May.
In December of 2024, Ackman directly plugged Fannie and Freddie as stock recommendations in a lengthy X post, stating, “Trump likes big deals and this would be the biggest deal in history. I am confident he will get it done.”
Others aren’t as certain as Ackman that a Fannie and Freddie merger and IPO would lower mortgage costs.
In an interview with Scotsman Guide prior to the Trump post implying a merger was in the works, mortgage attorney Marty Green called the reported IPO timeline “extraordinarily aggressive” and cautioned that moving too quickly with the process could be disruptive to the mortgage market and cause rates to increase in the near term.
On Monday, the editors of the conservative magazine National Review opined that taking Fannie and Freddie public again while maintaining an implicit guarantee that the federal government would bail them out again if they encounter financial hardship “risks setting up a similar scenario to the one that ended in disaster in 2008.”
“A major corporation operating with the implicit backing of U.S. taxpayers is not private industry. Capitalism operates under the profit-and-loss system. The market signal of a loss is just as important as the signal of a profit,” they wrote. “Pretending to be a private business while being insulated from failure is a lie, and it turned out to be a destructive one to the overall economy [in 2008].”
The National Review editors instead proposed an even bolder idea: Repeal Fannie and Freddie’s congressional charters and wind down the companies altogether.
“Instead of going back to what didn’t work, the administration should be looking for ways to get the government out of housing instead,” they stated.
