Could we please stop saying that it was the hybrid feature of Fannie/Freddie that caused them to fail?

I think we have enough failures across enough different types of financial institutions (Investment Banks, Commercial Banks, Thrifts,Insurance Companies and GSEs), and sufficiently (ahem) large rescue packages for them that we can say that the US financial system has very few purely private financial institutions (sorry Lehman Brothers).

Perhaps the new rule going forward is going to have to be that any financial institutions with assets of greater than $X billion will be required to have paid-in capital of greater than Y percent. I have no idea what X and Y should be, but the costs of making X a little too small and Y a little too big are almost surely smaller than the costs of the converse.