Investors Unite

In September 2008, the U.S. government placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship. The stated purpose was to stabilize the housing market during the financial crisis. Treasury injected capital and took a senior preferred position, but the existing shareholders — hundreds of thousands of individuals, pension funds, community banks, and institutional investors — were told their investments would be protected. The conservatorship was supposed to be temporary.

Then came August 2012. The government executed the Third Amendment to the Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements — the so-called “Net Worth Sweep.” Instead of the fixed 10% dividend Treasury had been receiving, the new terms swept every dollar of GSE profit directly to the government. In perpetuity. Shareholders would never receive another dividend. The value of their preferred and common shares was effectively zeroed out — not because the companies failed, but because the government decided to keep everything.

This is where Investors Unite comes in. Tim Pagliara, the CEO of CapWealth Advisors in Nashville, saw what was happening and refused to accept it. Individual shareholders had no power against the federal government acting alone. But together — organized, funded, and focused — they could fight. Tim founded Investors Unite as a coalition to give GSE shareholders a collective voice: to coordinate legal strategy, engage Congress, file amicus briefs, and make the case that the Net Worth Sweep was an unconstitutional taking of private property.

The coalition grew to over 2,000 members. They didn't just file lawsuits — they testified before Congress, wrote hundreds of articles, built media relationships, and kept the issue alive year after year when the establishment wanted everyone to move on. Investors Unite became the organizational backbone of the GSE shareholder rights movement.

This is the defining fight of my investing life. I got into the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saga in 2012 when I was running Global Speculation LP, my hedge fund. I was a Purdue-trained engineer who saw the Net Worth Sweep for exactly what it was: the government taking private property because nobody was powerful enough to stop them. I wrote about it. I organized around it. I connected with every person I could find who understood what was happening.

Tim Pagliara and Investors Unite gave all of us a home. A structure. A movement. Without Tim's leadership, the shareholder fight would have been a thousand individual voices shouting into the void. Instead, it became a coordinated campaign that testified before Congress, filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and forced the issue into the national conversation.

Twelve years in. Thousands of articles written. Hundreds of legal filings. Multiple trips to Washington. And we're still here. The crew — Tim, Bill Maloni, David Fiderer, Todd Sullivan, Robert King, Ryan McParlan, HV Patel, and so many others — never gave up. That's what Investors Unite represents: the conviction that if you know something is wrong, you fight until it's right. No matter how long it takes.