Affordable Housing Institute : US

Roughly ten days ago, the Administration officially flew the white flag in attempting any further regulation of the GSEs.

Legislation not pending?
 
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, with its usual Burma-Shave sub-headlines:
 
U.S. Puts Faith in Fannie, Freddie
Firms, Once Hemmed In, Are Freed for Bigger Role In Aiding Mortgage Market
 

We’re constrained as to our market […]

When most people threaten to sue, it’s simply a yawn-inducing tactic. 
 

Somebody’s suing me?
 
When a state attorney general does it, the tactic has more effect. 
 
Litigators!  Litigators!
 
Of such threat vaporware is New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo a past master, as he recently demonstrated by parlaying his face-down cards into an important settlement action.  […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1 .]
 
Yesterday, wondering who might be next in the writedown game, I hauled out a June, 2007 story from Inside Mortgage Finance that reads much more scarily now than it did back when it was first published.
 

Back when the only thing we had to worry about was The Bomb
 
Who’s next?
 
Yesterday we […]

We’ve barely had two weeks so far in 2008, and already we’ve had mega-writedowns from big Wall Street banks (Citi, Merrill, and Bank of America), a monoline insurer (AMBAC) lose its prized AAA rating, raise new capital and implicitly announce that it was on a voluntary glide path to orderly dissolution.  I thus find myself […]

 
A few days back, I posted on the GSEs’ performance in improving housing affordability, drawing heavily from a January, 2007 speech, now published by St. Louis Federal Reserve, by Federal Reserve Bank president of St. Louis, William Poole. 
 

 
Mr. Poole’s speech is a gold mine of insight.  As I’ve previously posted, the GSEs’ fundamental policy value equation […]