By Jeffrey Murphy ( May 24, 2017, 10:23 AM EDT) -- New residential home constructions, or so-called "housing starts", remain at less than two-thirds their level before the financial crisis. Rates of home ownership, especially among young adults, have fallen substantially over the past decade, and mortgage lending is increasingly skewed to borrowers with high (good) credit scores. GDP growth has been persistently weak in recent years, and Moody's estimates that the lack of home construction has reduced growth by 1.5 percent per annum. There is a bit of a consensus among thoughtful policy folks that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be shrunk and that the private-label mortgage securitization market should pick up the slack. Home mortgage interest rates, which are still at historic lows, are widely believed to be heading northward. Seems like a good moment to curtail the amount of private capital available to the home mortgage sector, right?...