Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

If you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere or frozen in an iceberg or something, you might not have heard that lending standards have tightened considerably.  The rest of us however, have been hearing it a lot.  Mortgage brokers, however don’t just get the headlines- they’ve been inundated with constantly changing guidelines from ever more paranoid lenders.  Consequently, when I saw the following "guidelines" being passed around the internet, I thought they were pretty funny:  [Hat tip to L for this version!]

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"Betting on Fannie & Freddie" - The regulatory decision on whether or not to lift the current mortgage portfolio caps on Fannie and Freddie is in the hands of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. CNBC’s Hampton Pearson has the story. Featuring "William Maloni, Former Fannie Mae Lobbyist" (and some other guy named "George").

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Stunned silence initially greeted Tuesday’s post wherein I laid into Bill Maloni’s GSE Blog about GSEs, systemic risk, and the Bean-Neugebauer Amendment to the pending regulatory reform legislation. Well, just about the time I was sitting down to tea that morning, Doomer G started getting reports from the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that the same debate had broken open in Washington among Fannie & Freddie, their regulator OFHEO, and assorted financial committee heavies in Congress. Before Wednesday was out, players all the way up to President Bush were weighing in, helping markets to gyrate wildly in late afternoon trading.[1]

Maloni in Washington tells Doom that the Capital is abuzz with the Fannie cap story, and media interest is intense.[2] So while Blogger Bill is putting on his TV makeup, or at least preparing for breakfast at Starbuck’s with The Canton Repository’s Washington correspondent, Housing Doom will try to gather up some of the pieces. The story is still as arcane as ever, but after yesterday a lot more people care.

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