Losing the plain vanilla mandate sucks deeply, but the really important battle regardless is what will happen to secondary market regulation. Fannie and Freddie and their regulators made plain vanilla the standard for decades – CRA activists in the 1980s actually used “plain vanilla” as an epithet, describing how the GSEs’ strict underwriting standards for this mortgages excluded minority/urban borrowers. The question now is how to best to reward and regulate plain vanilla on the secondary market level.