Freddie Mac, the government-chartered mortgage firm emerging from an accounting scandal, said profit fell 60% in the first half on a drop in the value of financial contracts used to protect against swings in interest rates.

Net income was $1.64 billion, or $2.22 a share, compared with $4.07 billion, or $5.74 a share, during the same period last year, the chief financial officer, Martin Baumann, said in a conference call. Mr. Baumann said second-half results will also fall as consumers take out more lower-yielding, adjustable-rate loans.

The earnings report is the third for McLean, Va.-based Freddie Mac since an internal investigation in 2003 found it understated net income by $5 billion, leading to a bookkeeping overhaul that will extend until year-end. The company said it won’t be current in its financial reporting until 2006, when it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We won’t have a good idea of what’s going on with these companies for another year,” an analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey in Arlington, Va., Paul Miller, said before the report, referring to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Freddie Mac, under Chief Executive Richard Syron, has slowed the growth of its portfolio to increase capital. Its holdings of mortgages and mortgage bonds grew 1.9% this year through July, to $660 billion.