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Serving Two Masters, Yet out of Control Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Peter J. Wallison, editor The AEI Press Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute WASHINGTON, D.C. 2001 Available in the United States from the AEI Press, c/o Publisher Resources Inc., 1224 Heil Quaker Blvd., P.O. Box 7001, La Vergne, TN 37086-7001. To order, call 1-800-269-6267. Distributed outside the United States by arrange- ment with Eurospan, 3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Serving two masters, yet out of control : Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac / Peter J. Wallison, editor. p. cm. Papers from three AEI conferences. ISBN 0-8447-4166-3 (pbk.) 1. Fannie Mae—Congresses. 2. Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation—Congresses. 3. Secondary mortgage market—United States—Congresses. 4. Mortgage loans—United States—Congresses. 5. Housing—United States—Finance—Congresses. I. Wallison, Peter J. II. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. HG2040.5.U5 S473 2001 332.7’22—dc21 2001045196 13579108642 © 2001 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Wash- ington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in cases of brief quotations embod- ied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, offic- ers, or trustees of AEI. THE AEI PRESS Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute 1150 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Printed in the United States of America Contents CONTRIBUTORS vii INTRODUCTION 1 1 Peter J. Wallison PART ONE BASICS ESTIMATING THE VALUE AND ALLOCATION OF FEDERAL SUBSIDIES 8 2 Robert S. Seiler Jr. THE ECONOMICS OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC 41 3 Robert Van Order FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE AND FEDERAL SPONSORSHIP OF 4 FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC: THE STRUCTURE OF SUBSIDY 56 Richard Scott Carnell AN ECONOMIST’S CASE FOR GSE REFORM 85 5 Charles W. Calomiris PART TWO CONTROLS AND RISKS HOW FANNIE AND FREDDIE INFLUENCE THE POLITICAL PROCESS 110 6 Ralph Nader SETTING GSE POLICY THROUGH CHARTERS, LAWS, 7 AND REGULATIONS 120 John C. Weicher v vi CONTENTS IMPROVING CONTROL OVER FANNIE MAE 8 AND FREDDIE MAC 139 Ron Feldman REFORM OF GSE HOUSING GOALS 153 9 Jonathan Brown PART THREE IDEAS FOR CHANGE THE PRIVATIZATION OF SALLIE MAE 170 10 Mark Overend AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO GSE REFORM 11 THROUGH NATIONAL MORTGAGE ASSOCIATIONS 175 Thomas H. Stanton Contributors JONATHAN BROWN has been the director of the Geographic Informa- tion System and Financial Research Project at Essential Information since 1991. The project conducts research and publishes reports on consumer protection regulation in the financial services sector, ac- cess to housing and small business credit, community reinvestment performance of banking institutions, and similar concerns. From 1989 to 1991 Mr. Brown was the director of Research on Financial Democ- racy, a consulting firm to nonprofit organizations on financial regu- lation issues. From 1985 to 1988 he was the director of BankWatch, a consumer advocacy project of the Center for Study of Responsive Law. Mr. Brown has served on several federal advisory committees including the GSE Working Group, Department of Housing and Urban Development; Consumer Advisory Council, Board of Gover- nors of the Federal Reserve System; and Advisory Committee on National Banks, Comptroller of the Currency. CHARLES W. CALOMIRIS is the Paul M. Montrone Professor of Finance in the Division of Finance and Economics and the director of the Program on Financial Institutions, both at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a visiting scholar and the codirector of the Project on Financial Deregulation at the American Enterprise Institute and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Calomiris has written papers and books on financial institutions, economics, and history. He has been a con- sultant on financial regulation for the Federal Reserve Board; Fed- eral Reserve Banks of New York, Chicago, and St. Louis; World Bank; Central Bank of Argentina; and governments of Mexico, El Salva- dor, China, and Japan. RICHARD SCOTT CARNELL is an associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law. From 1993 to 1999 he was the assistant vii viii CONTRIBUTORS secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department, where he helped secure legislation authorizing interstate banking and branching, establishing community development financial institu- tions, and reducing the costs and improving the quality of deposi- tory institution regulation. He also worked on Treasury’s financial modernization proposal. From 1987 to 1993 he was the counsel and then senior counsel to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, where he helped shape legislation reforming thrift regulation and federal deposit insurance. After a private law prac- tice in San Francisco, he was an attorney for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. RON FELDMAN is an assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where he oversees applications, surveillance, and special studies. His research focuses on government-sponsored enterprises, deposit insurance, and federal budgeting, as well as trends affecting financial institutions and banking supervision poli- cies; he has published several articles in that area. Mr. Feldman had earlier analyzed federal credit and insurance programs for the Con- gressional Budget Office. RALPH NADER is a consumer activist. Time magazine has named him one of the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century. He has worked for the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Con- sumer Product Safety Commission and has advocated many laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Freedom of Informa- tion Act. Mr. Nader has formed numerous citizen groups, including the Center for Auto Safety, Public Citizen, Pension Rights Center, Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, and student public interest research groups (PIRGs). In 1992, 1996, and 2000 Mr. Nader organized presidential campaigns to challenge the duopoly of the two-party system. He has written many books, including Unsafe at Any Speed. MARK OVEREND is a senior vice president of SLM Holding Corpora- tion (Sallie Mae). He joined Sallie Mae in 1986 as a director in the controller’s division and was promoted to assistant vice president (1988), vice president (1989), controller (1990), and senior vice presi- dent and chief financial officer (1997). His responsibilities have in- cluded oversight of capital market activity, financial planning and CONTRIBUTORS ix reporting, and tax planning and compliance functions. In March 2000 Mr. Overend assumed the leadership of the e-commerce and Internet initiatives at Sallie Mae. He had been on the staff of Arthur Young & Company in Washington, D.C., for seven years. ROBERT S. SEILER JR. is the manager of policy analysis at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the safety and soundness regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From 1986 to 1994 and 1997 to 2000 he was a senior analyst with the Congressional Budget Office, where he specialized in issues related to controlling and mea- suring the cost of federal credit programs, especially government- sponsored enterprises. Mr. Seiler was the principal author of CBO’s 1991 report on safety and soundness regulation of GSEs and has written about federal subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and federal regulation of those two enterprises. He has also written CBO studies on federal credit support for the financing of U.S. exports, infrastructure, and higher education and on the federal budget proc- ess and concepts. From 1994 to 1996 Mr. Seiler was a senior policy analyst at OFHEO. Before joining CBO, he worked for the Senate Budget Committee, for two members of the House of Representa- tives, and in the private sector. THOMAS H. STANTON, an attorney in Washington, D.C., provides le- gal and policy counsel relating to the design and operation of public institutions and the delivery of public services, particularly federal credit and benefits programs, government corporations, and finan- cial regulation. He is a fellow of the Center for the Study of Ameri- can Government at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches the law of public institutions. Mr. Stanton is the chairman of the Stand- ing Panel on Executive Organization and Management of the National Academy of Public Administration. His writings include A State of Risk (1991) about government-sponsored enterprises. He is a member of the advisory board of the Financier: Analyses of Capi- tal and Money Market Transactions. ROBERT VAN ORDER was named the chief economist at Freddie Mac in June 1987 with primary responsibility in research. Other respon- sibilities include macroeconomic analysis and forecasting and work with the media on developments in mortgage and other markets. Mr. Van Order had been the director of the Housing Finance Analy- sis Division at the Department of Housing and Urban Development x CONTRIBUTORS and a visiting professor of real estate at the Graduate School of Man- agement, University of California, Los Angeles. PETER J. WALLISON joined the American Enterprise Institute in Janu- ary 1999 as a resident fellow and as the codirector of AEI’s program on financial market deregulation. As a partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, he had practiced banking, corporate, and financial law in the firm’s Washington and New York offices. As the general counsel of the Treasury Department from 1981 to 1985, Mr. Wallison helped develop the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulating the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987 he was the counsel to President Ronald Reagan.
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