Who owns my house?

Last week I wrote about my surprise (http://politicswest.com/31067/me_and_my_mortgage) when I found out that my 30-year, fixed rate, vanilla home mortgage is now owned by Freddie Mac. The way I figure it, that means I live in public housing, since all of us taxpayers effectively own Freddie.

But that's not enough information for me. I'm curious about what Freddie has done with my mortgage. Was it sliced and diced into some sort of security instrument or instruments that are so complicated I won't possibly be able to understand them unless I go back to school and study more calculus (which I was never good at in the first place)? Was it bundled with lots of risky subprime loans?

Brad German, a spokesperson at Freddie Mac, is trying to help me find out where my mortgage is. When I spoke to him yesterday, he said that my request is winding its way through the bureacracy. Apparently "the security lawyers" are looking at it to determine whether this information that I am permitted to acquire.

What's the big deal here? It's my mortgage. Shouldn't I be able to know where it lives? I wouldn't even know that it was at Freddie if I hadn't asked Citimortgage, which processes the loan. The information doesn't appear anywhere on my monthly statements.

This is no quixotic quest. As a taxpayer, I now own a stake in the country's biggest banks. I've helped bailout Freddie and Fannie Mae. Somewhere, somehow, my own boring mortgage is part of this mess. I want to know how it all fits together.Stay tuned.

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