This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 11th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President wants to raise down payments on homes and phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,

but the report issued by the White House is Light on details.

Mark Calabria, Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the the Cato Institute provides a quick review.

If you're reading just the headline, hire down payments, phasing out Fannie and Freddie, these seem to be all to the good.

And that's fair to say, the administration's plan, if you want to call it that, for

phasing out Freddie and Fannie and reform in our mortgage markets, is very good on the vague generalities on yes you know Freddie and Fannie got out of

control yes they were unregulated yes they were acted as hedge funds and you know

yes they were driven by greed so a lot of what the report says at a very high level which is a sort of level that's pretty hard for anybody to disagree with is on target.

But many of the things that they propose to do are either absolutely no timelines are very vague.

I mean even the question about, well, we're going to start bringing down payments back to 10%

is the report says, over a number of years.

Well, how many is that?

You know, I mean, there's so much in the report

that's absolutely non-committal.

There's even questions about, okay, we're going to raise Fannie and Freddie pricing

to make it more reflective of the private sector is. Well, okay, that's kind of hard to argue with,

but without actual numbers in it.

I mean Congress directed the administration to do recommendations and an analysis.

And one would think within an analysis that you would get more than 22 pages of double

double spaced big print that doesn't actually give you any numbers.

For instance, the administration has a variety of forms, basically three large

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