by Susan Gates | Sep 14, 2018
What role did the housing goals play in the demise of Freddie and Fannie? How risky were those targeted affordable loans, really? In place for more than 15 years by the time the housing bubble popped in 2007, the GSE affordable housing measure how many units of...
by Susan Gates | Sep 5, 2018
Midafternoon on Friday, September 5, 2008, while the rest of official Washington sought to beat weekend rush hour traffic, Richard Syron, Freddie Mac CEO and Board Chairman, and his Fannie Mae counterpart, Daniel Mudd, met their fates in a conference room in an...
by Susan Gates | Aug 29, 2018
Just who (or what) was Freddie Mac? Why did our “murky government ties” matter so much? In the early 1990s, I helped staff a meeting between our top economists and some visiting officials from Mexico. After a hearty lunch, one of our visitors wiped his...
by Susan Gates | Aug 29, 2018
Since leaving Freddie Mac, I have thought a lot about my experiences there, about the things Freddie Mac did right and wrong, and more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the GSE-model of housing finance. I’ve looked at respected analyses of mortgage...
by Susan Gates | Aug 23, 2018
Early one Monday morning in late August 2008, I walked into another vice president’s office and shut the door. I needed to know how bad things were. He was more knowledgeable about where Freddie Mac stood in the capital sense, that is, whether the company was still...
by Susan Gates | Aug 23, 2018
So…here are are: August 2018 It’s been 10 years since the fateful unwinding of my former company, Freddie Mac. That once proud Fortune 50 company, along with Fannie Mae, had been the backbone of the country’s housing finance system. In many ways, it...
