Tag Archives: White House

Trump’s Plans to Privatize Fannie and Freddie

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from Cato Institute website, https://www.cato.org/people/mark-calabria

Mark Calabria, OMB Associate Director for Treasury, Housing, and Commerce

I was interviewed on  WBUR-FM’s On Point (distributed by American Public Radio), hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti for an episode on How Trump Plans To Get Government out of the Mortgage Business. The link has the recording of the show as well as a transcript.

The transcript of the interview starts,

CHAKRABARTI: Now that President Trump is back in the White House, it seems that he intends to get the job done this time around. Mark Calabria has returned to Trump’s administration, this time working on housing policy at the Office of Management and Budget. Bill Pulte is now director of FHFA, and he just made the highly unusual move of appointing himself chair of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making the regulator and the regulated basically the same.

Pulte also fired 14 of the 25 sitting board members at Fannie and Freddie. A shakeup many are suspecting is a first step in leading these two companies out of government control and into privatization. We’re talking about a huge part of the U.S. economy that underpins the housing market. So this hour, we want to explore what privatization of Fannie and Freddie actually means, what it should look like, and how it might have an impact on homeowners and the housing market.

So to do that, David Reiss joins us. He’s a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech, an expert in housing finance and policy. Professor Reiss, welcome to On Point.

DAVID REISS: Meghna, thank you so much.

CHAKRABARTI: I have to tell you that I actually can’t believe that it’s been 17 years since the financial crisis of 2008.

Let’s dust off the memory banks professor and go back to before 2008 and start there. Can you just remind us like what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were, what their purpose was, who owned them, et cetera?

REISS: I’m gonna go even a little bit further back than Fannie and Freddie’s creation, because I think it’s really gonna help people visualize what’s at stake here.

And if you think back to the 19th century and somebody was trying to buy a house, they didn’t have that many options. A house has always been a very expensive thing to buy, so they need to borrow some money to buy a house. And how could you do that?

Maybe if you’re rich, you could do it, or had a rich uncle, but otherwise you need to go to somebody who has capital and that you could borrow it and give them some interest in return. And pay them back over time, and be able to live in that house while you’re paying back the amount of money that you borrowed. And so if people think of It’s a Wonderful Life where there’s the Bailey Brothers building in loans and where they, people deposit their small savings into the buildings and loan.

And then some people are then able to borrow some money from the buildings and loan for mortgages. And there’s the famous scene where there’s a panic at the bank. And Jimmy Stewart says, Mrs. Kennedy, your money is in Mrs. Smith’s house. And Mrs. Smith, your money is in Ms. Macklin’s house.

And that’s the way it was done in the 19th century and the early 20th century. But there were real limitations to that. Sometimes communities didn’t have a lot of capital to lend people, so maybe in out west or in the Midwest there wasn’t a lot of capital, like there might’ve been back east in Boston or New York.

And so people who could have handled the mortgage just didn’t have access to it. It was like they were living in a dry area, and the fresh flowing credit didn’t reach their dry community. So during the Great Depression and the New Deal the government started to intervene, to spread credit out across the country in a way that kind of provided liquidity to all the communities where people wanted to borrow.

And Fannie Mae was a creature of the New Deal, but really took off in the ’70s along with its sibling Freddie Mac. And effectively, what those two companies were designed by Congress to do was to ensure that capital could go across state borders in a way that banks were typically not allowed to do. And they effectively created at first a national market for mortgage credit, and effectively when they access the global credit markets over time, an international global market for credit. So they’re really intermediaries.

Reducing Land Use and Zoning Restrictions

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By Narnaudov1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99170604
The White House hosted an event today on Reducing Land Use and Zoning Restrictions. While the event was pretty short — an hour or so — it had a bunch of heavy hitters presenting, including Professor Edward Glaeser of Harvard. For many years, Glaeser has written about how local land use laws restrict the construction of housing. It is great to see the White House taking this issue so seriously as it has a massive impact on the affordability of housing as well as the ability of people to move to places with lots of jobs, like the Bay Area.

This effort is part of Biden’s Build Back Better Plan, which is intended, in part, to

  • Incentivize the removal of exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies. For decades, exclusionary zoning laws – like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing – have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities. President Biden’s plan seeks to help jurisdictions reduce barriers to producing affordable housing and expand housing choices for people with low or moderate incomes. The Build Back Better Plan will create an incentive program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to reduce barriers to affordable housing production.

The Biden Administration seems to be picking up the gauntlet from previous administrations (here and here) that have made reducing land use restrictions on housing an initiative worth pushing. As opposed to the last two administrations, however, the Biden Administration is taking up the issue earlier in its tenure, so its push may have more legs than the ones that preceded it.

The Budgetary Impact on Housing Finance

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slide by MIT Golub

The MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy has posted some interesting infographics on The President’s 2019 Budget: Proposals Affecting Credit, Insurance and Financial Regulators:

The White House released the President’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2019 on February 12, just days after President Trump signed a bill extending spending caps for military and domestic spending and suspending the debt ceiling. While the new law has already established government-wide tax and spending levels for the coming fiscal year, the specific proposals contained in the budget request reflect Administration priorities and may still be considered by the Congress. Here, we consider how such proposals may affect the Federal Government in its role as a lender, insurer, and financial regulator.

Between its lending and insurance balances, it is apparent that the U.S. Government has more assets and insured obligations than the five largest bank holding companies combined.

Through various agencies, the US government is deeply involved in the extension of credit and the provision of insurance. It also plays an active regulatory and oversight role in the financial marketplace. While individual credit and insurance programs serve different target populations, they collectively reach into the lives of most Americans, from homeowners to small business owners to bank account holders and students. Note that this graphic does not reflect social insurance, such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

I was particularly interested, of course, in the slides that focused on housing finance, but I found this one slide about all federal loans outstanding to be eye-opening:

The overall amount is huge, $4.34 trillion, and housing finance’s share is also huge, well over half of that amount.

As we slowly proceed down the path to housing finance reform, we should try to determine a principled way to evaluate just how big of a role the federal government needs to have in the housing finance market in order to serve the broad swath of American households. Personally, I think there is a lot of room for private investors to take on more credit risk so long as underserved markets are addressed and consumers are protected.

The “Humbled” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

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photo by Lilla Frerichs

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is changing directions in a big way under the leadership of Mick Mulvaney as seen in its Strategic Plan for FY 2018-2022. In his opening message to the Plan, Mulvaney writes that the Plan

presents an opportunity to explain to the public how the Bureau intends to fulfill its statutory duties consistent with the strategic vision of its new leadership. In reviewing the draft Strategic Plan released by the Bureau in October 2017, it became clear to me that the Bureau needed a more coherent strategic direction. If there is one way to summarize the strategic changes occurring at the Bureau, it is this: we have committed to fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further. Indeed, this should be an ironclad promise for any federal agency; pushing the envelope in pursuit of other objectives ignores the will of the American people, as established in law by their representatives in Congress and the White House. Pushing the envelope also risks trampling upon the liberties of our citizens, or interfering with the sovereignty or autonomy of the states or Indian tribes. I have resolved that this will not happen at the Bureau.

So how do we refocus the Bureau’s efforts to better protect consumers? How do we succinctly define the Bureau’s unique mission, goals, and objectives? Fortunately, the necessary tools are already set forth in statute. We have drawn the strategic plan’s mission statement directly from Sections 1011 and 1013 of the Dodd-Frank Act: “to regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services under the Federal consumer financial laws” and “to educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions.” We have similarly drawn the strategic plan’s first two strategic goals and its five strategic objectives from Section 1021 of the Dodd-Frank Act. By hewing to the statute, this Strategic Plan provides the Bureau a ready roadmap, a touchstone with a fixed meaning that should serve as a bulwark against the misuse of our unparalleled powers. Just as important, it provides clarity and certainty to market participants. (2)

The subtext of this change in direction is not that “sub” at all. The Trump Administration wants to rein in the Bureau after it aggressively pursued financial services companies for violating a broad range of consumer protection statutes.

The Plan says that the Bureau will now act “with humility and moderation.” What that means is that the it will now be cutting financial services firms a lot of slack. Let’s see how a humbled Bureau works out for consumers.

People’s Credit Union v. Trump

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photo by Janine and Jim Eden

Twenty-one consumer finance regulation scholars (including yours truly) filed an amicus brief in Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union v. Trump, No. 1:17-cv-09536 (SDNY Dec. 14, 2017). The Summary of the Argument reads as follows:

The orderly succession of the leadership of regulatory agencies is a hallmark of American democracy. Regulated entities, such as Plaintiff Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union (LESPFCU) rely on there being absolute clarity regarding who is duly authorized to exercise regulatory authority over them. Without such clarity, regulated entities cannot be certain if agency actions, including the promulgation or repeal of rules and informal regulatory guidance, are actual agency policy or mere ultra vires actions.

This case involves a controversy over who lawfully serves as the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or the Bureau) following the resignation of the Bureau’s first Senate-confirmed Director. The statute that created the CFPB, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act), is clear: the Deputy Director of the CFPB “shall . . . serve as acting Director in the absence or unavailability of the Director.” 12 U.S.C. § 5491(b)(5)(B). Thus, upon the resignation of the Director, the CFPB’s Deputy Director, Leandra English, became Acting Director and may serve in that role until a new Director has either been confirmed by the Senate or been recess appointed.

Despite the Dodd-Frank Act’s clear statutory directive, Defendant Donald J. Trump declined to follow either of the routes constitutionally permitted to him for appointing a Director for the Bureau. Instead, Defendant Trump opted to illegally seize power at the CFPB by naming the current Director of Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Defendant John Michael Mulvaney, as Acting CFPB Director. Defendants claim this appointment is authorized by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (FVRA), 5 U.S.C. § 3345(a).

As scholars of financial regulation, we believe that Deputy Director English’s is the rightful Acting Director of the CPFB for a simple reason: the only applicable statute to the succession question is the Dodd-Frank Act. In the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress expressly provided for a mandatory line of succession for the position of CFPB Director, stating that the Deputy Director “shall” serve as the Acting Director in the event of a vacancy. Congress selected this provision after considering and rejecting the FVRA during the drafting of the Dodd-Frank Act, and Congress’s selection of this succession provision is an integral part of its design of the CFPB as an agency with unique independence and protection from policy control by the White House. The appointment of any White House official, but especially of the OMB Director as Acting CFPB Director is repugnant to the statutory design of the CFPB as an independent agency.

The FVRA has no application to the position of CFPB Director. By its own terms, the FVRA is inapplicable as it yields to subsequently enacted statutes with express mandatory provisions for filling vacancies at federal agencies. This is apparent from the text of the FVRA, from the FVRA’s legislative history, and from the need to comport with the basic constitutional principle that a law passed by an earlier Congress cannot bind a subsequent Congress. Moreover, the FVRA does not apply to “any member who is appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to any” independent agencies with a multi-member board. 5 U.S.C. § 3349c(1). The CFPB Director is such a “member,” because the CFPB Director also serves as a member of a separate multi-member independent agency: the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Plaintiff LESPFCU is seeking a preliminary injunction against acts by Defendants Mulvaney and Trump to illegally seize control of the CFPB, and it should be granted. As will be shown, LESPFCU has a high likelihood of success on the merits given the strength of its statutory arguments that the Dodd-Frank Act controls the CFPB Directorship succession. Unless the Court grants LESPFCU’s request for a preliminary injunction, LESPFCU will suffer irreparable harm because it will be subjected to regulation by a CFPB that would be under the direct political control by the White House that Congress took pains to forbid. Moreover, without a preliminary injunction, Defendant Mulvaney will continue to take actions that may place LESPFCU at a competitive disadvantage by creating an uneven regulatory playing field that favors certain types of institutions. See, e.g., Jessica Silver-Greenberg & Stacy Cowley, Consumer Bureau’s New Leader Steers a Sudden Reversal, N.Y.TIMES, Dec. 5, 2017. Nor will the President’s rights be in any way limited by such a preliminary injunction: the President remains able to seek Senate confirmation of a nominee for CFPB Director. All the President is being asked to do is fish or cut bait and proceed through normal constitutional order. The granting of a preliminary injunction is also very much in the public interest as it enables the controversy over the rightful claim to the CFPB Directorship to be resolved through an impartial court and not through a naked grab of power by the President.

Obamas Buy Their Rental

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2011 portrait by Pete Souza of the Obama family

Realtor.com quoted me in Former President Obama Finally Buys the DC Home He’s Renting: 6 Smart Reasons Why. It reads, in part,

Former President Barack Obama has decided that buying beats renting. The former first family have surprised many by purchasing the Washington, DC, house they’ve been leasing and living in since January, coughing up $8.1 million to call the place their own.

After vacating the White House, the Obamas had moved into the 6,441-square-foot, nine-bedroom, 8.5-bath mansion, located at 2446 Belmont Road NW in the tony neighborhood of Kalorama. The neighborhood has since become the place for the new political elite, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump moving into a luxe rental a couple of blocks away, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson snapping up a $5.6 million Colonial Revival down the street.

The reason the Obamas decided to stick around DC in the first place was so their younger daughter, Sasha, then a freshman at posh Sidwell Friends, could finish up high school there. With only three years to go, renting seemed to make sense so that the Obamas could easily pick up and move once she’s done.

But apparently, there’s been a big change of heart. Why?

On its surface, their decision seems a bit puzzling, given Sasha now has only two–and-a-half years to go. In real estate, the general rule is that it makes sense to buy a home only if you plan to stay put for five years, because this allows time for your house to appreciate, which helps you recoup hefty closing costs.

“People who sell after a year or two of ownership will often find that they have lost money on their purchase,” explains David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School.

Nonetheless, real estate agents and other experts we spoke to say there could be plenty of reasons it’s smarter for the Obamas to buy rather than rent, even for this short span of time. Here are a few possibilities to ponder.

Reason No. 1: They’re making a commitment to DC

As presidential spokesman Kevin Lewis explained in a statement, “Given that President and Mrs. Obama will be in Washington for at least another two and a half years, it made sense for them to buy a home rather than continuing to rent property.”

Granted, you can read a whole lot into that “at least” if you want. After all, as Atlanta Realtor® Bruce Ailion explains, “Many buyers think they will only be in a property for two to three years and end up living there three to seven years. That is common.”

And it might be an indicator that our former commander in chief isn’t ready to shed the political life quite yet.

“Perhaps they want to keep a foothold in Washington, DC, for other reasons with regard to political advocacy and involvement,” says Florida Realtor Cara Ameer.

Reason No. 2: In certain markets, 2.5 years is long enough to make a profit

While 2.5 years might not be long enough to profit on a home in general, that rule varies widely by neighborhood, based on rent levels, home prices—and how quickly both are going up. And this is one hot neighborhood.

It isn’t known exactly what the Obamas were paying in monthly rent, but estimates hover at around $22,000. It’s entirely possible that the former first couple did the math and determined that buying made far more financial sense, and that mortgage payments would be less of a monthly nut. (To find out what’s best for you, you can crunch the numbers in an online rent vs. buy calculator.)

*     *     *

Reason No. 5: This home will sell for a premium—he’s a former president, after all!

“It was always a little perplexing why the Obamas would ever rent if they planned to stay for anything longer than a year,” contends Washington, DC, real estate agent Rachel Valentino.

Her reason: “While they’re buying at market value, they can eventually financially benefit on the back end, where a buyer will pay significantly more for the celebrity factor. We aren’t Southern California, where every house has that star appeal. So, I can only imagine what a buyer will eventually pay to own a piece of history.”

Reason No. 6: Profits aren’t everything

“One lesson we can draw from this story is that buying a home should not always be seen as a financial transaction,” says Reiss. “Sometimes we buy a home because it’s best for our family at a particular time. Sometimes we buy a home because we fall in love with it. And sometimes those are the best reasons of all to buy a home, profits be damned.”