Category: GSEs

The GSEs’ future: Part 3, choose your poison

23 January, 2009 (12:26) | Capital markets, Finance, GSEs, HERA, Legislation and policy, Regulation and Reform, Subprime, TARP, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]
 

 
After two long posts focusing on outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s Remarks on the Role of GSEs in Supporting the Housing Recovery, we’ve seen that the Secretary:
 
1. Has concluded, with audible reluctance, that privately-run GSEs are likely essential.
2. Correctly restates the inescapable dynamic tension between social and [...]

The GSEs’ future: Part 2, you might as well live

22 January, 2009 (10:35) | Capital markets, Finance, GSEs, HERA, Legislation and policy, Regulation and Reform, Subprime, TARP, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we saw from outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s Remarks on the Role of GSEs in Supporting the Housing Recovery, that no matter how much he worries about their existence, he has (correctly, I think) concluded the GSEs play an essential role in creating omnipresent secondary-market liquidity, and in allowing targeted [...]

The GSE’s future: Part 1, we need the eggs

21 January, 2009 (10:50) | Capital markets, Finance, GSEs, HERA, Legislation and policy, Regulation and Reform, Subprime, TARP, US News | No comments

“I would, but I need the loans”
 
Guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.”
And the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?”
“I would, but I need the eggs.”
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
 
That, in a nutshell, represents the views of outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, as [...]

GSEs: my own private RTC

22 October, 2008 (08:41) | Capital markets, GSEs, Subprime, US News | No comments

Now that the US government de facto owns the GSEs, what’s it going to do with them?  I had no idea until I saw a headline in Bloomberg so remarkable I checked it directly with my friends at each agency. 
Fannie, Freddie to Step Up Mortgage Bond Purchases
 
What? I thought.  This is what got them into [...]

Banks, paying your rescuer: Part 2, the fine print

21 October, 2008 (11:58) | GSEs, Policy, Subprime, TARP, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we recorded the Godfather-like meeting, described in the New York Times, held last week in Treasury’s offices, in which the financial rescue’s architects, headed by Secretary Paulson, made the big banks an offer they couldn’t refuse.
 

“Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service [...]