A weekend topic on this Politico article. "With millions of suddenly unemployed homeowners expected to seek relief on their mortgage payments, a libertarian regulator is standing in the way of the federal government using its most powerful weapon to stave off a housing crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the state-controlled mortgage finance companies with a $200 billion line of credit to the Treasury, were created to ease disruptions in the market."

"Now, as bankers and affordable housing advocates alike clamor for the administration to tap the giant entities for a mortgage industry bailout, the Trump appointee who oversees them is rebuffing those requests. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria has long been on a crusade to shrink the footprint of Fannie and Freddie, which back more than half the country's $11 trillion mortgage market."

"A free-market economist, Calabria has even said he would not have rescued the companies in 2008, when the government seized them to stave off catastrophic losses during the nation's housing meltdown. The FHFA declined to make Calabria available for an interview for this story. But he has publicly dismissed industry concerns and forecasts as 'spin' and said it’s not Fannie and Freddie’s job to bail out private companies."

"The collection companies, known as servicers, are legally required to pay out funds to investors in mortgage-backed securities each month even when a borrower doesn’t pay — and the stimulus bill made no provision for backstopping them. One industry projection estimates that servicers will be on the hook for $100 billion in payments — a scenario that would wipe out many of the companies and destabilize the housing finance system."

"'We are in this awful crisis, it’s only going to get worse, and we have these tools,' said Anne McCulloch, CEO of the Housing Partnership Equity Trust and a former Fannie Mae executive. 'Fannie and Freddie were created exactly for this point, when there is a major crisis and you need to drive money into the American housing market — it’s really their only purpose.'"

"Yet Calabria maintains that forecasts of 25 to 30 percent of borrowers seeking delays in mortgage payments are over the top and flatly rejected the idea of setting up a program for mortgage companies earlier this month, saying Fannie and Freddie don’t have the capital."

"Mortgage bankers are scrambling to get the Federal Reserve to offer help to servicers, fearing that Calabria is counseling against any sort of lending for servicers. The Mortgage Bankers Association fired off a late-night statement slamming him for his 'troubling' remarks ruling out a Fannie and Freddie program for servicers last week."

"David Dworkin, CEO of the National Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy group, warned that 'we can very easily fall into the trap that we did 10 years ago of being obsessed with moral hazard and ending up with an immoral result' that ultimately hurts consumers and taxpayers. 'Right now, we’ve got to focus on crisis mitigation, because the housing crisis is coming, and if we don’t get in front of it, it will bury us,' Dworkin said."

"'You don’t put 20-30 million Americans out of work and bring them back with the flip of a switch,' Dworkin said. 'Those people are going to take months and years to be reabsorbed back into the workforce. That is going to have a devastating impact on Americans’ ability to make their mortgage payments.'"

"Moody’s economist Mark Zandi suggested the moral hazard argument — that the government shouldn’t provide incentives for risky behavior in the market — has no bearing on the current crisis. If servicers are 'struggling to survive, they’re not going to make loans, which is what the economy needs,' Zandi added."