That a government report would be delayed hardly seems shocking to me, but it is a surprisingly slow day for a Monday so let’s delve right into this:
According to a report from Nick Timiraos in the Wall Street Journal, a government report on the future of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and government interaction with the housing market is going to be delayed. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill required the Treasury Department to issue the report by January 31. It now appears that the report will be delayed until at least mid-February. According to the article, the delay is necessary to accomplish other “major policy objectives”.
From the article:
“People familiar with the matter say a final proposal has also been stymied by turnover of senior staff that had been heavily involved in drafting the report. There have also been policy disagreements between Treasury and White House officials, which has complicated efforts to reach consensus, these people said.”
The problems here are multi-fold. Everyone seems to agree that Fannie and Freddie played some role, in the financial meltdown, but nobody can agree to what extent they are culpable. Reasonable people think they were just one of many proximate causes. The unreasonable and willfully ignorant manage to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the GSEs, and of course lower-income borrowers. The rhetorical tone in Washington is one that is unlikely to foster rational debate and fact-based arguments, but moreso the spouting of political talking points and other gibberish. A good example of this is the upcoming Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s upcoming report, which was supposed to determine what the cause of the financial crisis was. The democratic participants are set to offer one opinion, while some of the republicans will endorse a different conclusion, while other republicans will endorse yet another conclusion.
I expect the results of this report to be pretty similar. The WSJ article offers some speculation on what type of proposals could come out of the report, and if you are interested I definitely recommend clicking through to read it. I am sort of uninterested in that speculation because I hold out little hope at this point that much of anything constructive will come out of the report that will cut through the obstructionist fog that currently envelopes Washington.
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