Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[Potty]

A couple of big themes good for GSE's from President.

First, there is a theme throughout the piece that one cannot do radical reform and simply ignore what has worked in the past. See this:

Further progress requires recognising that America’s economy is an enormously complicated mechanism. As appealing as some more radical reforms can sound in the abstract—breaking up all the biggest banks or erecting prohibitively steep tariffs on imports—the economy is not an abstraction. It cannot simply be redesigned wholesale and put back together again without real consequences for real people.

Second, when housing reform is mentioned the point is explicit that rather than radical new structures, the things that have worked in the past must be utilized:

...the housing-finance system has not been reformed. That should be an argument for building on what we have already done, not undoing it. And those who should be rising in defence of further reform too often ignore the progress we have made, instead choosing to condemn the system as a whole. Americans should debate how best to build on these rules, but denying that progress leaves us more vulnerable, not less so.

Some very interesting statements!