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Working Paper
Financial Characteristics of Cost of Funds Indexed Loans
Two recent articles by Hancock and Passmore (2016) and Passmore and von Hafften (2017) make several suggestions for improving the home mortgage contract to make homeownership more achievable for creditworthy borrowers. Though the proposals in the two papers differ in some aspects, one common feature is an adjustable rate indexed to a cost of funds (COF) measure. Such indices are based on the interest expense as a fraction of liability balance for one or a group of depository institutions. One of these, the 11th District Cost of Funds (COF) Index, was in wide use in the 1980s and '90s, but use ...
Journal Article
GSE guarantees, financial stability, and home equity accumulation
Before 2008, the government?s ?implicit guarantee? of the securities issued by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to practices by these institutions that threatened financial stability. In 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency placed these GSEs into conservatorship. Conservatorship was intended to be temporary but has now reached its tenth year, and policymakers continue to weigh options for reform. In this article, the authors assess both implicit and explicit government guarantees for the GSEs. They argue that adopting a legislatively defined ...