At General Motors, executives are fighting to save a company that has cut their salaries and suspended their vacations. On Wall Street, professionals are demonized and then asked to work overtime to repair the damage colleagues have wrought. These professionals may not deserve tears, particularly compared to the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes. But Mr. Kellermann’s death is a reminder that those suffering in this crisis reside in every neighborhood, from the squalid to the opulent.

Image Police on Wednesday outside the Vienna, Va., home where David B. Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, was found dead. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

“The pressure right now is relentless,” said a Freddie Mac executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak. “Everyone in the financial sector, regardless of where you work, is constantly told both that this is our fault, and that we have to work as hard as possible, otherwise the nation will fall apart.”

Mr. Kellermann, who spent more than 16 years at Freddie Mac and saw his stock and options decline precipitously last year, was at the intersection of some of the most difficult issues facing the company. Last month the company’s chief executive, David M. Moffett, resigned in part, he said, because federal regulators were using Freddie Mac to carry out economic policy at the expense of nursing the publicly held company back to financial health. The company has not had a president since 2007.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which together own or back more than half of the home mortgages in the country, have been hobbled by skyrocketing loan defaults and have received a total of $60 billion in federal aid since they were taken over last fall.

Mr. Kellermann was also working in a poisonous political atmosphere. In addition to taking criticism over the bonuses, he was recently involved in tense conversations with the company’s federal regulator over its routine financial disclosures, according to people close to those discussions who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Freddie Mac executives wanted to emphasize to investors that they believed the company was being run to benefit the government, rather than shareholders. The company’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Authority, had pushed to play down that language. Freddie Mac reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that changes it had made in practices to help the government “have increased our expenses or caused us to forgo revenue opportunities.”

Mr. Kellermann was also required to certify Freddie Mac’s filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclosed in March that there was a continuing federal investigation of its accounting, disclosure and corporate governance practices. That investigation is currently being overseen by the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which declined to comment. A spokesman, David Palombi, said Freddie Mac knew of no link between the death and the legal inquiries.

A spokeswoman for the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia said there were no signs of foul play in Mr. Kellermann’s death. The police would not comment on whether a note had been found, but a spokesman said that nothing except the body had been removed from the house.