Former Fannie Mae, MBA economist discusses business launch

Doug Duncan on the economy and new advisory roles

April 25, 2025 8:00 AM

Newly retired, longtime housing economist Doug Duncan doesn't expect to quietly ride off into the sunset.

After making plans to leave Fannie Mae last summer after 16 years, Duncan announced his return to the workforce in 2025, filing paperwork in March to officially launch a new business registered as Duncanomics LLC.

Following a career that saw him serve as chief economist at Fannie Mae and previously, the Mortgage Bankers Association, Duncan expects the knowledge and expertise that comes from decades covering the housing market will continue to benefit lenders and related industries.

In a wide-ranging recent interview with National Mortgage News, Duncan discussed the thought process that led to the start of the business, his definition of "retirement" and new goals going forward. He also offered thoughts on the developments he is watching in the current political and economic environment.

Duncan's responses have been edited for length and clarity

Duncan on what Duncanomics really is — and isn’t

Duncan: Really, it's three things, and it depends on how you define consulting. I don't think of myself as a consultant, because I tend to think of consultants as people that come in and help you with processes.

I'm more about information and the interpretation of data into information useful for decision making, and that can really come in three ways. One is in writing. I do intend to do some writing, primarily because I think writing is the best form for organizing and being disciplined about the completeness of your thinking.

And then second — speech or speaking. I'm getting a number of entities that say, "Are you still watching the data because we would like to hear from you?" Speaking is a second information form.

Third is advising. I'm on the board of one company, and I've talked to two or three other companies about possible board membership. All of those are things that, to me, are the collection of data, assessment of data and then the delivery of them, just in different formats.

There's the possibility of teaching a course at a university. That's, of course, a different venue for delivering information in a different format. These are all things I'm having conversations with people about.

Why ‘retirement’ was just a reboot

Duncan: Last fall, people started asking questions — 'What are you going to do in retirement?' People interpret the word "retirement" in a lot of different ways. For me, retirement did not mean never working on anything again. What it did mean was leaving the corporate world.

[It did mean] narrowing the kinds of things that I would do to things that were intellectually challenging and interesting, but not ignoring the capital that I had built up in the 30-some years of work in housing and real estate finance. I would like to be doing something, but I would also like to control the commitment of that time.

I am on one board. I've been on that board for about four years. It's a startup in the seniors healthcare space. And I'll plan on keeping that relationship going. I do have a couple of speaking engagements that I have tentatively agreed to, pending paperwork. I have a couple of other companies for whom I had some discussion about board representation.

Mostly at this point, it's developmental, because I, by intention, took the first quarter off to give myself some little bit of breathing room.

What’s next: The big economic questions he plans to tackle

Duncan: I expect the majority of activity will be related to housing and the macroeconomy. The macroeconomy can provide context for almost any industry. So if it's a general question about how a particular industry will be impacted by changes in economic activity, that certainly could fall within that range.

Later in my career, I was called on for more insight into how the [Federal Reserve] thinks about things, and I've always been pretty frank about that. My thoughts on the Fed haven't changed at all. They have a direct and indirect impact on interest rates, which matter to real estate finance, both real and nominal. That's something that, by definition, I would sort of be expected to comment on.

The role of tariffs and the relationship of tariffs to housing — certainly, that is an issue.

Labor markets — if you think about one of the things that the Trump administration would claim as a success is the drop in immigration, which they clearly campaigned on. I think they would claim that as a victory, but for the housing sector, it's a mixed bag, because immigrants impact both supply and demand.

I have, for a long time, been curious why the real estate business hasn't been more involved on both sides of the aisle trying to pull together a cultural agreement on exactly how we would like to address the issue of immigration. Clearly, there needs to be some broad cultural consensus. So that's certainly a possible area of commentary.

Housing, risk, and equity: the pressing issues in the market today

Duncan: I don't think you can avoid the housing supply issue [and] just general affordability. Do we think about affordability in the right way? The question is, does the structure of housing being provided reflect a change in social norms, which is not affordable for a significant part of the population? That's an interesting question.

People have been expecting a pickup in second mortgages or home equity loans and lines of credit. Is there a long period of retained knowledge on the fact that overleverage caused a lot of problems in the Great Financial Crisis, and people might still perceive borrowing against the equity in your home to be riskier than it once was?

When that equity is calculated by looking at the current price of the house, how should we be thinking about that today, given that they went up a lot in a short time? We seem to have returned to this view that house prices can only go up, and we know for the fact that they don't.

People are talking about how much equity they have in their home, but do they believe that's real equity? So lots of things to think about.

The general structure of things in the real estate finance business is fairly constant, though not completely. There are changes that take place, either in policy or in the structure of markets, that have to be reckoned with, and that can change the direction of things.

In the last couple of big downturns, whether it was the COVID-related shock or the Great Financial Crisis, there were interventions made into mortgage markets, which changed the existing contract in such a way that — if you think about it purely from an economic perspective — it distanced the collateral from the claim.

In the housing sector, we created distance that didn't previously exist between that collateral through the modification programs and the required restructurings. A question is, do the risk premiums in mortgage rates reflect that?

As a related question is if you prevent foreclosure, do you artificially change the direction of price appreciation, perhaps accelerating it? I think those are open questions, and those are things that are worth thinking about going forward in terms of the performance of the mortgage market and the housing market.

I start from the assumption that what we believe as a society is that markets are better on average than, for example, government mandates at allocating resources appropriately. Any time that you create a policy intervention to change the terms of trade in a market, you have to ask the question, are there second round impacts, not just first round impacts.

It should be a skill set for economists to say, 'Don't forget, when you do that, these other things are going to change as well, and you may not get the result that you think you're getting based on that first round.'

Doug Duncan, unchained

Duncan: I spoke to one group a couple of months ago, and the person introduced me as "Doug Duncan, unchained."

I said, "I understand why you make that statement, but I want to be careful to make sure that you didn't think I was lying to you for the last 30 years about the economic outlook."

My forecast is the one you see posted earlier on the Mortgage Bankers Association website or most recently, on Fannie Mae. That's my forecast. It's public and I'm accountable to it, and I use the thinking behind it to manage my own finances, so there will be no change in the relationship between what I think is true and what I tell you is true. I've staked my professional career on being honest.

I certainly make no claim of perfection, but I do make a claim that I've never lied to anyone about what my actual thoughts are about activities.

From economist to entrepreneur: What Duncan’s still figuring out

Duncan: The first thing is just making a decision about what it is you want to work on, and I haven't completed that decision yet. I think I have a pretty good idea of the range of things that would be interesting, and now it's a refining process to think where do I have information or access to information, accumulated knowledge, that makes it more likely I can be helpful in one space versus another.

I'm certainly well aware of my limitations. I don't want to characterize myself as offering more than what might be useful. If I can be helpful, I'll consider it a success.