Greg Mankiw quotes from the New Yorker:
Making Fannie Mae private moved its liabilities off the government?s books, even if, as the recent crisis made clear, the U.S. was still responsible for those debts. It was a bit like what Enron did thirty years later, when it used ?special-purpose entities? to move liabilities off its balance sheet.
In North Carolina the analogy is to TIFs, such as the city of Kannapolis and Cabarrus County took out for projects related to the North Carolina Research Campus.