mortgages and plays a crucial role

But with Fannie Mae so dependent buy burberry designer wallets elegant 2012 multicolor yellow on the fate of housing prices, it's too soon to say the company's finances are out of danger, said Bert Ely, an independent banking consultant. Fannie Mae lost $2.4 billion in the final three months of last year and needed $4.6 billion in government money. "We're seeing some hopeful signs burberry menswear, but these are like flowers that blossom in an early spring and then you get a freeze and they all wilt," Ely said. "We need to see several more quarters of data before we can read a trend into this." Fannie Mae buys and insures mortgages and plays a crucial role in the housing finance market. It and its smaller sibling, Freddie Mac, own or back 60% of the nation's mortgages. Regulators seized Freddie at the same time they took over Fannie Mae. The companies were brought to the brink of bankruptcy by hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgages they purchased or guaranteed during the housing boom. But Fannie Mae said Wednesday that it believed its losses had peaked from those loans. The company set aside $74.6 billion at the end of the first quarter to cover future losses burberry 2012, down from $76.9 billion at the end of last year.