A statement by former OFHEO head and now FHFA Majordomo, James Lockhart:
“Today President Bush signed the ‘Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.’ I thank President Bush and Secretary Paulson for their leadership in making government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) regulatory reform a reality.
The Act creates a world-class, empowered regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), with all the authorities necessary to oversee vital components of our country’s secondary mortgage markets — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks — at a very challenging time. As Director of the new agency I look forward to working with the combined Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB), Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) GSE Mission teams and with other regulators to ensure the safety and soundness of the 14 housing-related GSEs and the stability of the nation’s housing finance system.
For more than two years as Director of OFHEO I have worked to help create FHFA so that this new GSE regulator has far greater authorities than its predecessors. As Director of FHFA, I commit that we will use these authorities to ensure that the housing GSEs provide stability and liquidity to the mortgage market, support affordable housing, and operate safely and soundly.”
This should be fun to watch. This is the same guy who was spending $275k per head on almost 300 heads at OFHEO, and couldn’t get the job done. As there is no “interim” affixed to his title, I guess this is our man for the duration.
Director Lockhart: you might want to start by putting up a web site, given that you’ve been working on this for 2 years. If the Foot Health Foundation of America has been domain squatting on your .gov, I know some people who can help.
Seriously-this is supposedly the outfit now in charge of the “stability of our nation’s housing system,” and the only publicly available information about them is this press release, unless you count the actual legislation.
