David Stevens arrived as a commissioner at the Federal Housing Administration in 2009 vowing to restore financial discipline to a government housing body facing the stresses of a post-crash world. A former mortgage banker himself, Stevens, now 54, bolstered the agency's finances and pursued alleged wrongdoing at nonbank lenders including Berkshire Hathaway and Goldman Sachs & Co. affiliates.
One group the FHA did not feud with during Stevens' tenure: top industry players, such as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. A collection of emails between Stevens and the Mortgage Bankers Association may help explain why.
The communications reveal that while at the FHA, Stevens enjoyed close social and professional ties with the mortgage industry's main lobby — a group whose members originated roughly $300 billion in FHA-guaranteed loans last year.
Stevens turned to the MBA for policy memos, was copied on its internal lobbying strategy debates and asked its boss at the time to devise "an excuse" for him to attend one of its conferences.
The emails and Stevens' calendar, obtained from the Department of Housing and Urban Development under a Freedom of Information Act request, suggest that the sort of close ties between regulators and the regulated that have been blamed for contributing to the housing crash were alive and well at Stevens' FHA. This, despite the fact that shoddy underwriting practices among MBA members have caused mass defaults and hundreds of billions of dollars in government-guaranteed losses.
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