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24 Gunnar Blix spends his day analyzing consumer credit trends and the consumer economy, focused on the auto, banking, and mortgage verticals. Before assuming his role at Equifax, Blix led customer analytics for the company's mortgage vertical and provided analytic support for capital markets. Before joining Equifax, Blix had extensive experience in property and mortgage analytics; creating models for lead generation, attrition, and scoring in many verticals including banking, auto, insurance, telecommunications, and travel industries. He studied data science and machine learning at the University of Illinois and holds an M.S. degree in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. What does your day-to-day role look like as Deputy Chief Economist? I work closely with our Chief Economist, Amy Crews Cutts, and our daily activities involve collaborations with other people across the company, whether it's in supporting roles for sales or on the front lines with external relations. Mortgage is our largest vertical. at covers credit, income, and employment verification, as well as property and collateral analytics. While Equifax is a business-to-business company, our main mission is to enable the consumer to get necessary credit to manage their finances. On a daily basis, we analyze consumer credit—where consumers might be seeing signs of stress and where there might be opportunities—and then help our lender clients understand how they can best meet the needs of their consumers, without taking on unnecessary risk or causing further stress for the consumer. We also work closely with marketing and public relations to share insights with clients, the media, consumers, and other industry stakeholders, such as regulators. For that pur- pose, we produce monthly reports, quarterly webinars, and also support our verticals in reaching out to clients, agencies, and regula- tors to advocate for industry best practices. Lastly, we distill economic news and fore- casts from many other industry sources for our leadership and our finance department. What is the most rewarding aspect of these tasks? When I started with Equifax, I worked in analytics roles that were revenue- driven; first, focused on helping capital markets clients analyze pre-payment and default rates on mortgage-backed securities, then expanding to broader client-driven mortgage analytics. e most rewarding aspect of my current role is that we are insights-driven, and that means we can take the time to explore a topic that we may believe is important to the consumer, or the industry, and then dig in to try to understand the underlying market dynamics. Recently, that involved going back and taking a look at the impacts of Hurricane Sandy to assess what effects we might see from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in the medium- to long-term future. That's fascinating, what have you uncovered? We saw that even though there was early mortgage distress, borrowers went out and found solutions to stay in their homes—such as living in a second floor while they were renovating the first floor. Eventually, homeowners tended to get up- to-date on their mortgage. On the auto side, we'd see rapid replacement of autos, much of which was insured. We take this to mean that while there was a lot of distress in the Harvey, and Irma, and Maria markets, much of that will resolve with a little bit of time. Surprisingly, we also saw that some of the things that the GSEs were doing around modifications and forbearances had an indirect negative impact because the credit scoring models did not distinguish that the interventions were not consumer-driven, but were disaster-driven. And so, it shouldn't come back to hurt the consumer. ASK THE ECONOMIST HEAR DIRECTLY FROM TODAY'S LEADING MARKET EXPERTS. Gunnar Blix Deputy Chief Economist, Equifax "In 2017 we saw a decrease in first mortgages, which we think was largely because it was the year that we finally saw the long-anticipated rise in interest rates and this slowed down the refinance side."

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