Not really. Both were chartered by Congress, and at best are considered quasi-private. This position (being quasi-private) may actually be worse than either totally private or totally public, but in any case isn't anything close to unfettered capitalism.
I'm going to put a premature stop to this by beating everyone to the punchline.
Libertarians: "It's always, everywhere, every time the government's fault. If the government would just get out of the way, everything would be roses and flowers in Libertopia".
Left-wingers: "You're on crack. This whole thing happened because we need more government regulation. If we could just get good regulations and put the people in power over greedy multi-national globalized corporate ... (and so on) ... we would be much better off!".
Real-worlders: "Libertopia is about as likely to work as Marxistan, the system we have is pretty good, but will always need some tweaking. There is plenty of scope for debate, on a case by case basis, looking at the actual facts and data for each case. Sometimes we should tack away from regulations, in other cases some government intervention might work to improve markets. In this case, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were probably not that good an idea to begin with. Oh, and by the way, these sorts of debates probably don't belong on Hacker News;-)"
Oh, and by the way, "wholesale indictment of American capitalism" is just handwaving. "American capitalism" is an awfully broad range of things, from Joe's Corner Sandwich Shop to Goldman Sachs to, well, Y Combinator.
Pigeonholing commenters is kind of patronizing, isn't it? Those general arguments, in the right context and with the right facts, can all be reasonably made.
"The right context" is over a bottle of good wine, an offer open to anyone who happens by the same corner of the world I happen to be in. I didn't mean to be patronizing; there are smart people I respect that take those views, merely to 'head them off at the pass'.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both groups had board appointees from the government. The market basically assumed they were "too big to fail", meaning if trouble happened, the government would take over.
When a company isn't run by it's shareholders and beholden to the market, bad things happen. Many of the choices made by both groups wouldn't have made it had there been better oversight.
Government involvement was the problem here, not capitalism.
