Pearl River      Bill Pulte is the administrator of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the huge mortgage guarantors that are critical to the housing market and the ability of Americans to own and remain in their homes.  Of course, he’s a Trump diehard, and that’s not the problem, exactly.  Trump has the right to appoint a supporter to this position.  Nonetheless, there have to some limits, and this guy is an embarrassment and doesn’t seem to have a clue about the job he should be doing, because he seems to believe his only real job is to be subservient to every whim of the president no matter what it might do to these agencies or all of our mortgages.

The scandals surrounding this guy are compounding faster and more furiously than interest rates on a mortgage.

First, there seems little doubt that he broke the seal on any confidentiality around mortgage documents in order to enable Trump’s revenge tour directed at resolving his grievances with former FBI director Comey and New York State Attorney General James.  Cooked up indictments from a questionably appointed and qualified interim US Attorney who had been a personal Trump lawyer, alleged they had entered fraudulent information in mortgage documents.

Now in a single day, the Associated Press reports that several agency employees were fired for raising concerns that Fannie Mae’s marketing director had “provided confidential mortgage pricing data from Fannie Mae to a principal competitor, alarming senior officials of the government-backed lending giant who warned it could expose the company to claims that it was colluding with a rival to fix mortgage rates.”  The employees were worried that the agency was being dragged into something illegal, so by trying to protect Fannie Mae, they were fired and pushed out, but the marketing director who crossed the line is of course still at her desk in the same job.

If Trump was reading this, he would know there was a mess in mortgage land.  Since we can all bet that his chief of staff definitely was reading this, she would know this was more than a flashing warning sign.

If she missed it, she would definitely have seen the long piece on Pulte in the New York Times, which was almost embarrassing to read.  The pictures of his dilapidated trailer parks said more than the thousands of words.  Pulte seems to be a top of the class self-promoter, like others we know in the White House, and like his big boss cares little for how he stretches his resume and family connections.  He created a weird Twitter Philanthropy to buy his way to more than a million followers.  He claims connections to his family housing construction business, the third largest in the country, but the family, the company, and the real family philanthropy have gone out of their way to distance themselves from him and his hyperbole, including kicking him off the board, while he continues to take credit for it all and ignore the confusion he’s creating.

Trump may like the fact that Pulte whispered in his ear about 50-year mortgages, but that’s not the way policy works. There’s a line of experts forming around the block about what a bad long-term idea this is.  Only banks might be happy to have even more interest paid for the smaller monthly payments, but there is no way this is a win for prospective home buyers.  Having mortgages paid in crypto might make Trump happy as well, but that also seems more slapdash than serious.

This guy isn’t competent for all intents and purposes, even as housing and affordability issues are now centerstage in American politics.  All the administration needs is an egomaniac, fabulist, and narcissist in the driver’s seat on this issue.  My bet is that the chief of staff will read the papers and realize her job is hard enough with one of that sort to deal with and won’t long abide a similar loose cannon firing randomly around Washington and the country.