Federal Home Loan Banks, a network of government-chartered cooperatives founded during the Great Depression to support housing finance, may soon evolve and grow. Currently, regulators are weighing allowing the cooperatives to expand to nonbank firms and real-estate investment trusts (REITs). Still, many say the cooperatives will be abandoning their mission to provide funds to community lenders and question if REITs should receive taxpayer-subsidized funding. In the meantime, Mark Calabria, Director of the FHFA, says regulators aren’t vying for a particular outcome. “Everyone would love to have access to cheap funding,” he said in a recent interview. “But how do we make sure that we have the appropriate safeguards and that members are mission-focused?”

Read more via the Wall Street Journal.