William Emmons

By CHUCK GREEN Back in 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in trouble. In fact, without government intervention, they faced imminent collapse, and on Sept. 6 of that year, both were placed in conservatorship by the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. With those conservatorships hitting their 15th anniversary, William Emmons, an adjunct lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, said the takeover was historically significant because they were the first large-scale government interventions in what came to be known as the Global Financial Crisis. “In other words, their collapse was a bellwether of things to come. Lehman Brothers failed one week later, which triggered the chain reaction of collapsing banks, AIG, and market confidence,” Emmons told The…