Midwinter Housing Conference
March 6th, 2009
Last week I had the great privilege of attending the Midwinter Housing Conference; a meeting of some of the top minds in the housing finance industry. This is obviously a real departure from shooting superstar DJs, so my loyal readers might wonder if I’ve departed from my mantra, “shoot what you love.” Quite the contrary. I have a strong interest in the economy as an entrepreneur, a former landlord, and director of the Utah Creative Freelancers Network. I want to understand what happened to the market, and where it’s likely to go next. The housing finance industry is at the heart of the credit crisis that is currently putting a damper on the US economy as a whole, and few people know as much about these topics as the attendees of this conference. When my friend Ann Torrence asked me if I wanted to shoot this conference, I was determined to make it work.
What I didn’t know at the time is that a storage order mix-up would cost me a week of photo processing time right after the Sundance Film Festival, that I would be hit by some unexpected (and large) financial burdens (I shot this event on small margins), and that I would have a photography book deadline the same week. Thanks for the entrepreneurial genes, dad. Sometimes I think a 9-5 would be easier. Nah!
It was absolutely worth the challenge. The highlight of the conference was an insightful discussion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led by James B. Lockhart, III, the Director (CEO) and Chairman of the Oversight Board of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, regulator of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the 12 federal home loan banks. My biggest take-away from this was that Fannie and Freddie were (until recently) much healthier than the media led me to believe. Let me be clear – they’re severely broken — but a handful of private labels are much, much worse. And that’s Scary!
Wait. You’re not scared? I’m telling you that the bulk of the horrible loans were given by the private labels, totally unconnected to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two giants have their fingers in a huge share of the mortgage industry, and they’re responsible for a relatively small fraction of the total delinquent loans. Keep that in mind while you take in this slide:
What we have in the financial industry is an imbalance where most of the banks, lenders, and institutions are stable, but there are a few really big players that went catastrophically bad, investing heavily into stupid no-money-down loans. I think at this point I should apologize for taking advantage of my lender’s stupidity and feeding the delusion that no-money-down loans are a good investment by paying all my mortgage payments on-time. In other words, I broke America. My bad!
Or maybe it was AIG:
So here’s the deal:
You can download all sorts of nifty photos (and the ski race video above) from the non-commercial use archive. You can use these on your Facebook sites and share them with your families, but you can’t use them on your commercial websites or business cards.
Printing and Commercial Use:
If you want to print the photos (the ones above may be too small), or use them for commercial or journalistic purposes, you get to be my beta testers. I am testing a new (to me) rights-managed stock solution that provides a cool gallery and shopping cart to purchase images, powered by PhotoShelter. I have them arranged by date:
If you have any questions about ordering, please don’t hesitate to call me at 801-735-9606, or use my contact form to zap me an email.
Special thanks to Jeff McGrath for the ski race photos, and of course, Josh Kump for the great ski race video footage.