You had your full legal rights in three important areas. You had the right to buy Fannie shares. You had the right to hold Fannie shares. And you had the right to sell Fannie shares. Government didn't tell you to buy Fannie shares. Government didn't tell you to sell your Fannie shares. And government didn't tell you to hold your Fannie shares. The government took NO ACTIONS to help or hurt shareholders in Fannie Mae. The government only took action to prevent the collapse of the U.S. economy and the risk of a Depression that could have set off another Great Depression and a 25% unemployment. Had the government not acted as it did with conservatorship of the GSEs, TARP and QEI/QEII I believe the risks of such dire outcomes were HUGE. And, yes, that is just an opinion, but it is a widely held one.
Once HERA was imposed, UST believes that FHFA had virtually limitless and unreviewable powers to protect the broadly defined citizenry from another crisis. Now the court will decide if they went too far in this endeavor.
When 4.5 million people have their properties taken from them, with another 4 million at risk of foreclosure, that is a taking far larger and more significant in magnitude to the public corpus than the financial wealth of investors, many of whom are not even today underwater. They just haven't gotten a ginormous payday as they had hoped for. They took the risk of thinking they were smarter than everyone else that sold their equity shares and, at least so far, have been shown to have made a bad choice.
JMHO.
