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Weekend Must Reads

| Posted in Member Corner

Fortune: The Fed's other trillion dollar problem The amount of money banks have at the Fed recently reached 13 digits, for the first time ever. Bloomberg: New Home Prices Say What’s Different This Time Although no two business cycles are alike, most share some common characteristics. The interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy -- housing and manufacturing -- tend to…

The Bigger Picture: Housing Subsidies and National Economies

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A survey of housing finance in other countries sheds light on the distortion that government subsidies for housing can cause in national economies. Professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business have pointed out that one thing that Spain and the United States have in common is a “massive misallocation of their economy’s resources to construction. The oversupply is…

Media Buzz: That Time American Exceptionalism Isn’t So Exceptional

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Contrary to the Fannie & Freddie defenders’ assertions that America’s unique GSE-model of housing finance is the “envy of the world,” yesterday’s full committee hearing found that the U.S. ranks only 17th in the world in terms of the rate of homeownership. Our 65% homeownership rate puts us behind Australia, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, all of which provide far less…

How the U.S. GSE Model Measures Up to the Rest of the World: We’re Number... 17?

| Posted in Member Corner

Proponents of the GSE model of housing finance often assert that the costs of that model are justified because it provides benefits that no other countries enjoy. In fact, before the collapse of the GSEs in 2008, their supporters often argued that “American housing finance is the envy of the world.” But the reality is that for all of the resources and subsidies that the GSEs directed (we…