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96 this goes to not just housing, but [also to] how does housing and the financing of housing— whether it's rent or ownership—fit into larger family concerns of health care, education, and preparing for retirement. So I think that that is an important larger view to have when one is thinking about housing policy. DO YOU THINK THERE IS ENOUGH EMPHASIS BEING PLACED ON SUSTAINING HOMEOWNERSHIP? I think there is a bit more now than there was 10 years ago, but probably still not enough. I think we underestimate the negative consequences—and the negative impact on families—of mortgage defaults. is has tremendous impact on the longer- term financial well-being, the health of the families, the impact it can have on children, of finding themselves in an unsustainable homeownership situation. And the other thing about federal housing policy is that so much of it is driven at hiding support or subsidies or incentives to take on debt, as opposed to true homeownership, which is having equity in your house, and that gets to the sustainability question as well. WHAT ARE YOU THE MOST PROUD OF HAVING ACCOMPLISHED DURING YOUR YEARS WITH THE FHFA AS DIRECTOR? I would have to start to answer that with simply that the conservatorships accomplished their goal, which is to ensure the GSEs' stability and solvency so that the country can continue to have a liquid and functioning secondary mortgage market. rough the crisis, through all the uncertainty and turmoil, we managed to conduct and lead these conservatorships in a manner that investors continued to invest in the mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie and Freddie and that lenders in the primary market could have confidence in making mortgage loans, knowing that they could be securitized through the secondary mortgage market. at is certainly the first and biggest, and we did that through not only the challenges of the economic circumstances, but during a period of enormous house price declines and mortgage defaults, through great uncertainty regarding not just the market, but the future of Fannie and Freddie and serious hidden capital challenges we faced at both companies. e next thing is, as difficult as this was— particularly getting it started up and working properly—a great deal of homeowner assistance was provided through the conservatorships during my time there. We did more than 3 million foreclosure avoidance transactions with families from the time of the conservatorship to the time that I left, most of these being some form of loan modification or loan repayment alternatives that allowed folks to stay in their house. ere is a negative narrative around the HAMP program. HAMP underwent a number of improvements over time and most of those changes in HAMP came from things we were experimenting with at Fannie and Freddie that the Treasury Department then looked at and said, "OK, that seems to be working better; we want to adapt that into HAMP." We also had over 3 million HARP refinances. I thought HARP 2.0 was a very successful program in particular. We did these things—the loan mod programs, the foreclosure avoidance, the HARP—responsibly by balancing the interest of taxpayers with the challenges facing homeowners, and we were analytically driven in how we went about doing it. I would say I'm also quite pleased with the strategic plan that we issued for the conservatorships in 2012 and how we started a path toward a post-conservatorship realm, developing a common securitization platform, initiating the risk transfer transactions, publishing a great deal of loan level data from Fannie and Freddie that facilitated the capital markets' activity with these risk transfers … those were very important steps, clearly stabilizing the finances of Fannie and Freddie. We benefited from the direct support of the taxpayer through the Treasury Department invest, and we also benefited indirectly from things such as the Federal Reserve policies, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and so forth. So these are all accomplishments that I am quite proud of. During the period in which I was the acting director, the Federal Home Loan Banks built their capital in a meaningful way; they made some very important changes to their structure that I think will benefit that system over the long term. We refocused the banks on their mission. We had several troubled banks that we were dealing with. During my tenure, we put the Seattle Home Loan Bank under a consent order, and I am very pleased with the final resolution, with this involving not just the stabilization of the Seattle bank but the successful merger of that bank with Des Moines. I think that's a very important accomplishment of the home loan bank system. And finally, during all this, the FHFA was still a brand-new agency. We were created six weeks before the conservatorship started, and we had to build the agency by combining staff from other government agencies and hiring new staff and really orienting this agency to be an important entity going forward to assist the government in carrying out whatever current and future role it may have in overseeing the housing finance system. HAVE THERE BEEN ANY POLICIES THAT HAVE BEEN ENACTED SINCE YOU LEFT THE FHFA THAT YOU STRONGLY AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH? Director Watt, and any FHFA director, has a very difficult challenge in managing conservatorships while awaiting for an uncertain congressional resolution—uncertain in that you don't know when it is going to happen and exactly what it's going to look like. So that really creates a lot of both near-term and long-term challenges regarding personnel with the companies, compensation, business investments, and general policy determinations. ere appears to be a broad consensus to end the GSE model. ere are various bills, all of which would wind down Fannie and Freddie. So while there appears to be this consensus and the administration has been supportive, there has been no actual action to accomplish that yet. at alone makes being a conservator very difficult. ere are a number of important initiatives that continue to progress [through] the FHFA that I am very happy to see. Directionally, they are in line of where we were going. Even if some of the specifics may or may not be exactly the same as I would have done it. I think it is really important: the continued emphasis on the HARP program, finalizing the PMIERS (private mortgage insurance eligibility requirements), the mortgage servicer eligibility standards, the continued development of the CSP, and the continued evolution of risk transfer transactions. ese are all really important developments that are continuing to take place. And that shows some good signs of progress, even while we are awaiting legislative action on ending the conservatorships. Now, Director Watt has concluded certain things somewhat differently than what I did because those changes are there for everybody to see. He ended up in a somewhat different place on guaranteed fees than I was headed. I stated that I was going to gradually reduce loan limits. Financ- ing, the housing trust funds, and the 3 percent down payments are a few examples that are policies different than what I had. ey are what they are, but like I said earlier, this is a very challenging set of responsibilities and there's a lot going on at FHFA that I am pleased to see continue to develop. My main concern is that the CFPB and market participants do not appear to have worked out a transition process for implementing TRID that all sides can have confidence in. I THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THAT SAME THING. I think so, and so that's troubling. It remains rather uncertain what to make of the ability-to-re-

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