Q: Nobody will tell me and I confuzeled
A: They were companies that made loans and loan guarantees, and between them they owned or guaranteed 50% of American mortgages, the equivalent of about $5,000,000,000,000. They were hit badly by the credit crunch and subprime crisis, suffering significant losses with no end in sight to those losses, and so a couple of weeks ago the federal government intervened and took the companies over.