GSE 2.0 Scare Tactics: False Claim That No Government Guarantee = No Thirty-Year Mortgage

The propaganda strategy for selling the public on the creation of supposedly new improved GSEs is becoming more apparent. Recall that we had an initial skirmish a month ago, when the Center for American Progress published a plan to reform Fannie/Freddie and the housing finance system. It would create an FDIC-like insurance fund to stand behind private Fannie/Freddie like entities that will offer reinsurance with an explicit Federal guarantee on mortgage-backed securities. These new firms can also be controlled by banks. This plan, which was very similar to ones presented by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed, t was clearly an Administration trial balloon; the CAP is the mainstream Democrat think-tank, with close ties to Team Obama. But after the CAP proposal got some resistance, the Treasury’s report, which came later in the month, went the route of presenting three alternatives rather than a specific plan. But we argued at the time that this seeming change was merely a tactical move, to present the Administration as fair brokers in a politically fraught process, and that it still favored what we called the GSE 2.0 plan. We think the idea of reconstituting the GSEs in somewhat improved form a terrible idea because it preserves the bad incentives of a public/private system and launders housing market subsidies in an inefficient and unaccountable way through the banking industry (see here and here for more detailed discussions).

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GSE 2.0 Scare Tactics: False Claim That No Government Guarantee = No Thirty-Year Mortgage



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