Ginnie Mae this week announced plans to reform its document-custody policies as part of a long-term effort to modernize the way it manages documents in order to minimize agency risks. Michael Drayne, Ginnie’s senior vice president of issuer and portfolio management, said the updates and improvements will apply to loan documents that serve as collateral for securitized pools of mortgages. Ginnie will follow...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency settled $10.3 billion in legal claims in 2014 stemming from 11 non-agency MBS issues that go as far back as 10 years ago, noted the FHFA’s annual report to Congress released this week. These lawsuits were filed in 2011 against financial institutions along with some of their executive management including officers and directors. The suits alleged violations of federal securities laws and state laws in the sale of the non-agency MBS to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that took place in a two-year period during the housing downturn between 2005 and 2007. A number of issues contributed...[Includes one data table]

Freddie Mac announced its fifth Structured Agency Credit Risk debt note offering in 2015 this week. This $950 million offering comes on the heels of last week’s STACR offering of $425.6 million, which was the first transaction under a new structure that shares a reference pool of loans with a previous transaction.Last week’s STACR Series 2015-HQ2 has a reference pool of single-family mortgages with an unpaid principal balance of more than $30.3 billion. Freddie said the reference pool consists of a subset of 30-year fixed-rate single-family mortgages acquired by Freddie in the first through third quarters of 2013 with loan-to-value ratios from 80 to 95 percent. Analysts from Moody’s Investors Service said Freddie used part of its 58 percent....

Contributing Treasury’s warrants for common stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the affordable housing funds is one of the ways that the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights says the GSEs can help earmark financial resources toward affordable housing. In a June report published by the Leadership Conference, the organization offered a few of its housing finance recommendations to support affordable housing goals. The report noted that often lost in public discussion of the GSE conservatorships is the fact that the Treasury owns warrants for 79.9 percent of the common stock of both Fannie and Freddie. “The value of the warrants could easily exceed $100 billion,” the group said in its recommendation.

The face-saving mechanism in the CFPB's announcement was a claim to the discovery of a legal glitch.

VantageScore suggested that lending to "upsiders" and "minimalists" can be accomplished without increasing default risk.

The FOMC said it will increase rates when it sees further improvement in the labor market and inflation looks to be under control.

Lew said it’s not the right time to talk about ending the GSEs’ conservatorship and paying dividends.

Industry observers noted that FAQs didn’t answer some of the big questions that matter to lenders, such as quality control, student debt and pre-funding review requirements.

An estimated $95.9 billion of mortgages bigger than the traditional agency loan limit were produced during the first quarter of 2015, a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals. Jumbo production – all single-unit mortgages with loan amounts exceeding $417,000 – was up 7.9 percent from the fourth quarter. That was slightly off the pace set in overall mortgage originations, which rose 12.9 percent from the previous quarter. Conforming-jumbo production was...[Includes three data tables]