Tag Archives: sustainable housing market

Defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

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Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in Capra's Its a Wonderful Life

I signed on to this important letter, along with hundreds of others:

349 Consumer, Civil Rights, Labor, Legal Services and Community Organizations

April 29, 2025

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, DC

Re: Support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Dear Representative,

The 349 undersigned consumer, civil rights, labor, legal services and community organizations and academics write to urge you to demand action to restore a strong and independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We further urge you to oppose changes to the CFPB’s funding, structure or other changes that would weaken its ability to stand up for consumers, competition and a fair financial marketplace.

The CFPB, created after the devastating 2008 financial crisis, has worked to protect consumers and responsible industry players alike. The CFPB has obtained over $21 billion in relief for over 200 million people, including $363 million for servicemembers and veterans, and its consumer protection mission continues to be overwhelmingly supported on a bipartisan basis. The CFPB has worked to support a healthy, sustainable housing market, improve credit reports, crack down on junk fees, reduce the burdens of medical and student debt, fight lending discrimination, and promote safe banking practices and banking competition. Now more than ever, we need a strong CFPB that will continue to keep our personal financial data safe, protect our privacy, and fight fraud.

Congress created the CFPB, and Congress must support ordinary people and fair competition by standing up for a strong and independent CFPB.

Yours very truly,

The full list of signatories can be found at the link here.

Accurately Measuring Mortgage Availability

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The Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center has posted a research report, Measuring Mortgage Credit Availability Using Ex-Ante Probability of Default. This report tackles an important subject:

How to strike a balance between credit availability and risk to achieve a sustainable housing market is a much-debated topic today, but these discussions are not grounded in good measurements of credit availability and risk. We address this problem below with a new index that measures credit availability and risk simultaneously

The first section of the paper discusses the limitations of the existing measures. The second section describes our development of the new index, which distills borrower credit profiles, loan products and terms, and macro economic conditions into a measurement of the weighted average probability of default for mortgages originated at a given time. The third section illustrates the value of this measure by empirically exploring the varying risk appetites of the market as a whole, and of market segments, which directly aids evidence-based policymaking on how to open the tight credit box. The final section discusses the limitations of this new index. (1)
The report concludes,
Measuring a concept as complicated and varied as credit access is no easy task. Yet this is an important time to ensure that it is being measured accurately. As we seek to reform the housing finance system, Congress, the housing finance industry, advocacy groups, policymakers, and even the general public need to clearly understand how well the market is providing access to mortgage credit for borrowers. (18)
I say amen to that. There is a slim chance that housing finance reform may be back on the table in Washington, given the midterm election results. We need as much good data we can get in order to structure a system based on solid principles rather than on the views of special interests that typically dominate this debate.
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