Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[kthomp19]

WARNING: you all do know he’s a policy wonk and he’s an advisor at the Cato Institute, right? It’s 36 minutes long and you WILL be bored. He has strong opinions about agency independence, banking regulation, housing policy, he does want a combined financial regulator (at a minimum merging FHFA into the OCC), etc.

I listened to the podcast, thank you for the link.

He ADMITS pushing back on the Trump Admin when they wanted him to move on the GSEs because he thought as a regulator he shouldn’t buck what he thought was the will of Congress (HERA).

His quote at 14:53 is "I had fights with the Trump administration when I was an independent regulator and I was willing to push back on things."

However, the topic was the fact that FHFA is not independent anymore and that federal policy on many things, including housing now that the President can fire the FHFA director at will, is subject to a whipsaw effect where things change drastically whenever a President of the opposite party takes the White House.

Calabria's quote did not pertain to the conservatorships. You seem to have misconstrued it. I didn't hear any mention of the conservatorships at all in the entire podcast.

Another good quote by Calabria was at 30:22, though it also wasn't specifically about the conservatorships or even FHFA/FnF: "There's no enforcement mechanism for many parts of financial regulation. Sometimes there's the regulated entity, but external stakeholders - the rest of us - often don't have an avenue to make regulators follow the law."




When it comes to Calabria, something to keep in mind is that he has been much more active on social media recently, and by all appearances is angling for a spot in Trump's administration if Trump does win in November. This could very well be a second stint as FHFA director.

That means that his views can certainly affect FnF shareholders in the future and thus he needs to be given a lot of credence.