This Wednesday it was the economists' turn. As part of the processing of the capital markets reform, also known as MK4, the Finance Committee of the Chamber of Deputies received UDD professor Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel and former Finance Minister Mario Marcel, who presented differing views on the proposed initiative, as well as some objections to one of the key measures of the project: the National Housing Fund (Fonavi). With this, they joined the risks that Central Bank President Rosanna Costa had pointed out on Tuesday regarding the same topic. One of the observations of the former head of public finances under Gabriel Boric's government regarding the proposal was the possibility of selling packages of mortgage loans instead of selling them one by one. On this, he specified that "the CMF (Financial Market Commission) and the Ministry of Finance should calibrate the deductible in the bidding terms to safeguard public resources, but without exceeding the threshold that triggers the mandatory retention of the loan, and perhaps the possibility of selling homogeneous packages of mortgages should be considered, that is, rather than selling the mortgage on the margin, trying to constitute and sell more balanced packages of mortgages to the fund." On the other hand, he pointed out that "it is worth noting the contrast in home purchases with the measures that have been or will be implemented to stimulate real estate investment for rental, because in the miscellaneous project there is a very reduced rate for real estate industry investment, with a very large gap with the general first-category tax rate." He also commented that "many mechanisms to prevent price increases are not observed here (in the project), an issue we saw when legislation on the rate subsidy and mortgage guarantee was passed. Perhaps it is something worth discussing." Regarding the fiscal impact, Marcel argued that "it is necessary to have an estimate of the fiscal cost of the guarantees, that is not included in the financial report, and when there is a state guarantee, in principle that should be capable of being estimated." For his part, Schmidt-Hebbel referred to the deductible that Fonavi would contemplate, which would be 3.5%. On this matter, he argued that this figure exceeds "the current effective loss on bank mortgage loans, which varies between 0.5% and a maximum of 1%, and therefore banks might not participate or, if they do, they might increase the mortgage rate instead of lowering it. So, an improvement, I think, could be a lower deductible set by regulation and not by law." "The other thing that I think is important is that the deductible be set not for each individual mortgage loan, but over a complete portfolio, a package of loans," he added. The fiscal impact Another aspect of the project that Marcel addressed was the fiscal impact of the reform. In his view, "this project returns to the same dynamic as the reconstruction project, that is, calculating or estimating an impact on growth and assigning the compensation of the fiscal cost to that future growth, which in this case is estimated on average at US$200 million per year during the first 10 years of validity, but without yet considering the fiscal cost of the guarantees via Fonavi." "The truth is that this formula is complex, because based on what was the experience of the reconstruction law, we started repeating this in any initiative that seeks to promote growth. We will always find a future date on which sufficient revenue will be generated to compensate for the initial cost, but in this case, for example, that only happens in 2032, that is, already after the end of the current administration. So, this is not good practice," he commented. For his part, Schmidt-Hebbel explained that, in his view, the fiscal impact estimates of the reform prepared by the Finance Ministry are conservative. Specifically, the economist argued that he finds "the estimate of the impact on growth conservative, and therefore the compensating effect via tax revenue from higher growth seems to me underestimated, and therefore, as a result, it seems to me that the net impact, considering the growth impact, may be somewhat overestimated for the deficit corresponding to the years in which deficits occur, or underestimated for the surplus in the (period) in which surplus years occur." Card Fraud Law Another aspect that Mario Marcel addressed in his presentation was the proposed changes to the Card Fraud Law, where the standard is modified from gross negligence to slight negligence when it is considered that the user did not maintain safeguards in the use of their devices or passwords. According to Marcel, in recent years there have been pendulum movements on this: "We had a very drastic law protecting users, then we saw that many abuses were generated, we reformed that law to limit those abuses and self-fraud, and the truth is that at this moment the main thing to prevent these frauds from escalating is the banks' investment in security measures." "The rest of the proposed measures seem reasonable, but changing from gross negligence to slight negligence, or on the other hand, doing what the Banking Association is proposing, which is that the CMF rule on the validity of customer claims, the truth is that the CMF does not have the capacity to handle them," he added. 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