Fannie Mae's Chief Economist Gives Economic Forecast (Part 1 of 2)

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

Dr. Doug Duncan, Fannie Mae's Chief Economist gave his Economic Forecast in June 2023. Dr. Duncan is the recipient of the prestigious Lawrence R Klein Award for Most Accurate Forecaster Over The Past 5 Years, he was also named by Bloomberg and BusinessWeek as one of the Top 50 Most Powerful People in Real Estate. Learn from one of the smartest economists in the U.S., who advises the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve on real estate matters. He delves into the topic of bank failures, and sheds light on what lies ahead for interest rates.

Full video recording: https://bit.ly/43YaODA

Slides: https://bit.ly/444rIAo

Read the entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/wzyy5rc8

What is the underlying theme for economic activity over the succeeding years?

Each year, I spend time in December or January thinking about what is the underlying theme for economic activity over the succeeding years. The reason I do that is this isn't a check against ourselves, the actually team does this, but I want to know whether at the outside of a time period. We had a good feel for the major impulses that were underway in economic activity in particular housing, because as the business Fannie Mae is in and then we use that to test ourselves across the course of the year, what did we miss, if anything or we are just lucky? Did we just make it a lucky guess? But it's also something that we can hang the discussion on when we're talking with people out speaking. So, the interesting fact of it is the optimal number of words for that theme is less than seven. People will remember if it's less than seven words, if it's more than seven, it gets lost so this is for awaiting improvements and affordability. It's not just affordability and housing that rise in interest rates means affordability across the economy and credit affordability, that kind of issue. So, it's intended not just to focus on housing, though it certainly does apply to housing.

Housing market supply issue.

We believe that geopolitical change is going to lead to the restructuring of supply chains and that's time consuming and expensive. The Fed is going to be leaning against the restructuring of supply chains, and you're seeing the stories emerge now about how difficult it is to replatform your company from one country to another country to strike relationships, shipping and transportation relationships, restructuring those things can be time consuming and expensive. We felt like that we got ahead of that one before others did. That's going to be a contributor to the underlying rate of inflation for some time.

What is the relationship between housing and the business cycle?

There is a typical relationship between housing and the business cycle. As the Fed tightens on anticipation of the rise in inflation or in response to the rise of inflation, interest rates go up. Housing is very interesting since this is the first thing that happens: residential fixed investment, which is dynamic targeting building starts to slow; then, the next thing that happens is New Home Sales start to slow because builders are building less and so there are less being sold and then existing home sales start to slow. When the recession is full force and fit, interest rates come down, construction starts to pick up, new home sales start to pick up and existing home sales start to pick up so there's a predictable relationship. That was not the case in 2007 to 2009 because the center of the financial problem was the decline in underwriting standards in real estate so it was the core of the issue.

Dr. Doug Duncan

Fannie Mae

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