Imagining Life without Fannie and Freddie

From the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson.

KUDOS to Treasury and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for some straight talk about the nation’s broken mortgage system.

A report to Congress from those departments, published on Friday, provided some long-awaited analysis by the Obama administration about what went wrong in housing finance — and how to fix it.

The report, entitled “Reforming America’s Housing Finance Market,” zeros in on the perverse incentives created by the nation’s mortgage complex during the years leading up to the panic of 2008. The Treasury’s recommendation that we wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and let the private mortgage market step in is spot on.

So what’s next?

Still, it is not clear that such moves, sensible though they are, will be enough to prevent taxpayers from having to bail out institutions that back mortgages in the future. That is because the debate over how to put the Treasury’s ideas into effect will soon become a brawl. Powerful participants are already working overtime to keep taxpayers on the hook.

The opponents to reform: the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Center for American Progress. They are urging the creation of a new federally-related entity.

Taxpayers surely do not want to create new government-sponsored enterprises that may later fail. So why not work toward a system where the government is solely the home lender of last resort? That way, the private market could operate in good times; the government would step in only if the market froze up.

Friday’s report seems to be leading in this direction. But it supplies no road map to a government system that provides a catastrophic insurance program only for those times when the private market is not working.

There is much to hash out if we are to build an effective housing finance system in America. Being truthful about what went wrong in the past, the report paves the way for a meaningful discussion. But we must also be sure that the solutions do not bring us back to where we began. That is where the real fight will be fought.

Read the full article.

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