Newly Retired Freddie Mac CEO to Become Senior Fellow at Harvard

The recently retired CEO of Freddie Mac is headed back to his alma mater for the next step in his career. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said in a statement released yesterday that Donald Layton, who officially retired from the government-sponsored entity Monday, will be a senior fellow and focus on housing finance reform. In the same announcement, the school also said that Layton would be joined by Michael Stegman, the MacRae Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former senior official in the Clinton administration and in the Treasury Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s.”I am very pleased to have both Don and Mike affiliated with the center over the coming year to share their expertise and their views,” Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, said in a statement. “Other fellows, who bring a wealth of expertise and a diversity of perspectives, will also join this discussion from time to time. Given the profound importance of the housing system in helping to make housing available and affordable – not to mention in determining the health and stability of the macroeconomy – I’m hopeful that our fellows will make a significant, positive contribution to this year’s burgeoning policy debate.”

Layton graduated from Harvard Business School in 1974 and has spent the last seven years of his 40-year career in the financial services industry. He lead Freddie Mac through a period of fundamental reform and has a unique and authoritative understanding about the operations of these enterprises and how different policy proposals could play out in practice.

Stegman has had not only a distinguished career as an academic, but also had senior policy positions in the White House and at the Treasury during the Clinton and Obama administrations, and so has been deeply immersed in both the technical and political aspects of the housing finance reform debate.

The coming year, according to Herbert, has the potential to be a momentous one in the long drawn out process of reforming the U.S. housing finance system.

The Trump administration will soon release its plan for administrative and legislative reforms of the system, which it has indicated is a high priority for the remainder of the president’s term. Meanwhile, newly appointed FHFA Director Mark Calabria has indicated that he intends to take steps to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from conservatorship as soon as practicable.

Newly Retired Freddie Mac CEO to Become Senior Fellow at Harvard

This Week’s Newspaper

Newly Retired Freddie Mac CEO to Become Senior Fellow at Harvard