There are some worrying trends buried in the tables of Freddie Mac’s quarterly refinance statistics for 2018. This, of course, is just a small slice of the economic pie, but the data have all the hallmarks of another housing bubble.

In early March, just before the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association voted in favor of allowing the uniform mortgage-backed security for delivery in the to-be-announced market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hosted a conference.

Freddie Mac will restructure all future credit-risk transfer offerings through its flagship Structured Agency Credit Risk program as real estate mortgage investment conduits, Kevin Palmer, senior vice president for single-family credit risk transfer, said.

Mortgage sellers repurchased just $833.7 mil-lion of single-family loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities last year, according to a new Inside the GSEs analysis. [Includes one data chart.]

A roundup of the week's developing news.

Joseph Otting’s dual role as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency puts him in a position to push hard for changes that will help create a “healthy” non-agency mortgage market, according to the Structured Finance Industry Group.

President Trump earlier this week unleashed his fiscal year 2020 budget on Washington, chockful of implications for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Kathy Kraninger, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, assured lawmakers that she will not disrupt the mortgage industry by abruptly terminating the so-called GSE patch.

JPMorgan Chase is apparently warming up to the idea of financing non-qualified loan originators, according to at least two industry officials who claim to have knowledge of the matter.

In just over two weeks, the first quarter will come to an end with many conventional lenders closing the books on what likely was a trying three months — one shaped by lower originations, tight profit margins and worries about the future.