The two sibling GSEs experienced a wildly divergent earnings period during the first quarter of 2011 as Freddie Mac posted its first quarterly gain in two years while big sister Fannie Mae announced losses that drove it even deeper into the red. [Includes one data chart.]

Two California members of the House, one Republican, one Democrat, have introduced a bill to extend indefinitely high-cost loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA due to expire this fall.

A federal appeals court last week upheld a lower court ruling that shareholders of Freddie Mac cannot sue the former directors and officers of the GSE for losses following the government takeover of Freddie by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mortgage servicers should already be in the process of preparing to implement Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's soon-to-be unveiled servicing requirements as the two GSEs work to roll out new rules in the coming weeks.

Lawmakers on a House subcommittee last week approved by a wide bipartisan margin a bill that would create a legislative framework for a covered bond market in the U.S. and, some critics contend, an unnecessary competitor to the Federal Home Loan Bank system.

Government housing policy and agencies played a much larger role in the housing crisis than initially believed, but a fresh look at the conclusions of two GSE critics has prompted a top JPMorgan Chase analyst to take the unusual step of issuing a public retraction.

Faced with a declining originations outlook, mortgage lenders should take advantage of today's more plentiful warehouse lending environment to review strategies that were developed during the liquidity crisis, industry experts say. The warehouse capacity issue has swung 180 degrees from where it was a few years ago, said Elaine Batlis, a senior vice president at Silvergate Bank, during last week's national secondary market conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Back in 2006-07, there was an oasis of liquidity; pricing was good and terms were flexible, Batlis said. But in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, there was a sudden...

Although the new repurchase claims submitted by investors to mortgage lenders appeared to ease in the first quarter of 2011, the industry continues to carry a growing inventory of unresolved buyback demands. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reported that lender repurchases or indemnifications totaled $2.8 billion during the first quarter of 2011. That was down from $5.9 billion in the previous quarter, a figure that was swollen by Bank of America's large-scale settlement of buyback demands from both government-sponsored enterprises. In fact, the volume of GSE repurchases during the first three months of 2011 was the lowest quarterly volume since... [Includes one graph and one data chart]

Officials at Redwood Trust, the real estate investment trust that made headlines last year by sponsoring the first non-agency securitization of newly originated mortgages since the financial crisis began in 2008, have a favorable outlook on the residential market – yet the biggest challenge right now remains the low volume of production. Redwood Trust is upbeat about the future, for a number of reasons, according to Brett Nicholas, executive vice president and chief investment officer. "Proposals to reform the government-sponsored enterprises issued in February 2011 call for phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," he said during...

In a business dominated by a handful of super-sized national lenders and production volume in a nosedive, lenders have to pay more attention to how they compete for the dwindling pool of potential borrowers. Spending more time on acquiring industry knowledge and reaching out to customers will pump up originators' performance, according to a recent report released by Mortgage Source Success, a client acquisition and retention solution provider. "In less than a decade, mortgage loan origination in the U.S. has been turned on its head," the report said. "Not only has the economic crisis severely reduced the number and dollar-volume of originations, but...