Housing policy experts at a Washington, DC, forum this week were generally supportive of renewed efforts to address the quagmire in which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been stuck for over eight years, but there was less evidence of movement to expand the credit box. A group of high-profile policy experts led by Urban Institute Senior Fellow Jim Parrott recently tried to re-ignite the mortgage reform effort by calling for the merger of the two government-sponsored enterprises and providing an explicit government guarantee for the new entity’s mortgage-backed securities with private capital taking the first loss. Barry Zigas, director of housing policy at the Consumer Federation of American and one of the co-authors of the paper, said...