Next week, the Administration will host a conference entitled “Conference on the Future of Housing Finance.”  Raj Date, our executive director, will attend the conference on behalf of the Cambridge Winter Center.

Ahead of that meeting, it may be useful to watch this 8-minute talk delivered by Raj at the Roosevelt Institute’s “Make Markets Be Markets” conference earlier this year.  It recaps the core problem with the GSEs:  that their government backing quite predictably neutered debt market skepticism over the GSEs’ credit risk-taking, and, in turn, that absence of debt market discipline inevitably led to disastrous credit decisions.