In a joint brief filed this week, federal respondents took issue with arguments made by GSE shareholders in their fight against the net worth sweep and said a shareholder petition for a Supreme Court review of their case should not be granted. Shareholders in several cases filed three petitions for a writ of certiorari back in November. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court of the United States to intervene to “restore certainty and uniformity.” They claim that the Federal Housing Finance Agency acted unconstitutionally when it imposed the net worth sweep.

Freddie Mac Names Head of HR and Diversity. Freddie Mac announced that Jacqueline Welch has been named head of the Human Resources, Diversity & Inclusion (HRDI) division and chief diversity officer. In her expanded role as senior vice president of HRDI and CDO, Welch will be a member of the company’s senior operating committee and will report directly to Freddie Mac CEO Donald Layton. Welch joined Freddie in December 2016, and the GSE says she brings more than 20 years of experience in HR strategy and execution to the company. Chicago’s Bridgeview Bank Now Fannie Mae Approved. This week, Chicago-based Bridgeview Bank announced it has received Fannie Mae approval, which allows the company to expand its consumer home financing business.

A huge rebound in securitization of credit-card receivables in 2017 helped boost the non-mortgage ABS market to a significant 21.2 percent increase in new issuance, according to a new rank-ing and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS.

Although the stars might be aligned for legislative reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this year, new developments late this week illuminate the difficulty of the task at hand.

After a typical lull at the end of the year, issuance of non-agency MBS is coming fast and furious. A number of issuers are prepping deals backed by a variety of newly originated loans, including prime jumbo mortgages, expanded-credit mortgages and loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises.

Issuers of MBS and ABS are finding ways to finance their holdings of retained risk in the wake of risk-retention requirements that came into effect in 2016, according to attorneys at the law firm of Mayer Brown.

Freddie Mac recently introduced a new front-end credit-risk transfer option for its Agency Cred-it Insurance Structure program, the second-largest form of its CRT activity.

The plan of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee to shrink the U.S. central bank’s huge balance sheet probably will unfold with a bit of a lag because of the uncertainty surrounding principal payments and the forward-settling nature of the to-be-announced MBS market, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

After their case against the Federal Housing Finance Agency was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for Delaware in November, government-sponsored enterprise shareholders David Jacobs and Gary Hindes recently filed an appeal.

Correspondent lenders and insurers may benefit from a recent decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Eighth Circuit regarding indemnification for prior settlements.