Regulator: Administration Sees Key Role Continuing for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

The Obama Administration expects Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue playing a key role in housing finance, the government sponsored enterprises' regulator said. While exactly what structure the GSEs will eventually take is still very much up in the air, James Lockhart, director of the recently minted Federal Housing Finance Agency, said they will be reconstituted with a well-defined mission that does not involve excessive risk taking. That's likely to mean the two companies, which are now in conservatorship and under FHFA's wing, will no longer be required to meet affordable housing goals that were prescribed by their old mission regulator, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "In retrospect," Mr. Lockhart told attendees at the National Association of Real Estate Editors' annual real estate journalism conference in Washington that the goals "caused (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to do things they shouldn't have done." The federal regulator also said the GSEs should operate under "clear demarcation" of their roles in relation to the private sector, and that any risk they undertake should be explicit, at actuarial cost and in conjunction with sound insurance principles. "Clearly," he said, "it was folly to allow the enterprises to legally leverage their mortgage credit by well over 100 to 1."