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Fannie Mae Posts Profit That Sets a Record

The mortgage giant Fannie Mae passed a symbolic milestone at the end of the fourth quarter, generating profits that will push its total payments to the federal government higher than the amount it received in the 2008 bailout, the company reported Friday.

The company earned a record $84 billion in profit in 2013, it said, and the fourth quarter was its eighth consecutive profitable quarter. Next month it will hand over its fourth-quarter dividend of $7.2 billion. That means that Fannie and its competitor Freddie Mac, which also received a bailout, will have poured more into federal coffers, $192.4 billion, than they received in government support, $189.5 billion.

The payment does not wipe out their draws on the Treasury, however, or remove them from conservatorship. There is no mechanism for the companies to pay back their debt, but in return for the bailout the government has claimed all of their profits. The company’s profitability may slow the momentum of efforts on Capitol Hill to change the nation’s housing finance system. President Obama, Democrats and Republicans have all voiced support for such reform.

“Today’s move is largely symbolic but it doesn’t change the underlying dynamic,” said Julia Gordon, the director of housing finance and policy at the Center for American Progress. “It may be a profitable company but it is not a viable company, nor is it a company that is investing in its own future.”

Two years ago, no one expected Fannie and Freddie to become profitable again so quickly, and there was little question that the system they embodied needed to be changed. No fewer than 26 proposals for doing so have been floated in Washington, and the Senate Banking Committee is expected to put forth a new one in the coming weeks, said James Parrott, a former economic adviser to President Obama and now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

If their efforts falter, lawmakers will be starting over in the next Congress in a very different environment, one in which Fannie and Freddie are noted less for their role in the crisis and more as a source of revenue.

“What has put fundamental reform within reach is the widespread recognition that we have no choice,” Mr. Parrott said. “If we have not achieved broad, structural reform by the time that moment of recognition passes, we may never achieve it.”

Fannie Mae’s profits were almost five times as great as they were in 2012, also a record year. They were buoyed by underlying market conditions like rising home prices and a falling default rate, as well as one-offs like payments from banks to cover losses from faulty mortgages and a hefty change in the value of the tax write-down on some assets.

The company received $117.1 billion in government support and will have paid $121.1 billion into federal coffers when it hands over its fourth-quarter dividend of $7.2 billion.

Investors like Perry Capital and Fairholme Funds have sued the government, saying that as shareholders they have a right to some of Fannie and Freddie’s dividends. And housing advocates have said that a portion of them should go into an affordable housing trust that was set up just before the financial crisis.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Fannie Mae Posts Profit That Sets a Record. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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