Just in time for the holidays, the Congressional Budget Office has released its analysis of the costs and benefits of various alternatives to our current system of mortgage finance, particularly the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The report examines three possibilities:
- A hybrid public/private model in which the government provides explicit guarantees on privately issued mortgages or MBSs;
- A fully public model in which a wholly federal entity would guarantee qualifying mortgages or MBSs; or
- A fully private model in which there would be no special federal backing for the secondary mortgage market.
The report doesn’t really push one option over another, but simply lays out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Some highlights worth keeping in mind as the debate continues into the new year:
“Relying on explicit government guarantees…would also have some disadvantages…If competition remained muted, with only a few…firms participating in the secondary market, limiting risk to the overall financial system and avoiding regulatory capture could be difficult…federal guarantees would reduce creditors’ incentive to monitor risk. Experience with other federal insurance and credit programs suggests that the government would have trouble setting risk-sensitive prices and would most likely end up imposing some cost and risk on taxpayers. In addition, a hybrid approach might not eliminate the frictions that arise between private and public missions.”
“Privatization might provide the strongest incentive for prudent behavior on the part of financial intermediaries by removing the moral hazard that federal guarantees create. By increasing competition in the secondary market, the privatization approach would reduce the market’s reliance on the viability of any one firm. Private markets may also be best positioned to allocate the credit risk and interest rate risk of mortgages efficiently, and they would probably be more innovative than a secondary market dominated by a fully federal agency. Further, privatization would eliminate the tension between public and private purposes inherent in the traditional GSE model.”
It is worth remembering that over the years, the CBO has actually been quite strong in warning against the dangers of the GSE model. Sadly Congress simply chose to ignore those warnings. Here’s hoping that the CBO has little more influence on this issue than they’ve had in the past.
