Then you can easily agree that the companies were far from humble while accepting advantages from the government that were not privy to other private companies. And having dozens of friends over at Fannie, I can assure you that they aren't humble either.

Keep in mind that a lot of the Fannie restatement was from trying to keep returns DOWN to span them over the years. I don't think this was investor driven....if a company can't return, then investors sell. This was a mixture of bad market decisions, with some bad corporate decisions - partially brought about by government missions to fund in any market, and a decent amount of corporate bloat.