The New York Times Company filed a motion this week and is intervening in a case to have access to testimony pertaining to Edward DeMarco, former acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, stating the government has failed to show good cause for sealing the documents. DeMacro, along with Mario Ugoletti, are both witnesses in the Fairholmes Funds v. The United States case and each testified in May. Ugoletti was a senior official with the Department of Treasury during the government bailout of the GSEs and is now special advisor to FHFA Director Mel Watt. The plaintiff in the case, Fairholme Funds, moved to have the “Protected Information” designation...
A pay raise windfall is coming for the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as the Federal Housing Finance Agency revealed this week the removal of a pay cap and approval of a raise that could reach $4 million each in annual total compensation. The GSE executives, Timothy Mayopoulos of Fannie and Donald Layton of Freddie, each earn approximately $600,000 without bonuses. This amount was part of a salary cap initiated by the FHFA in 2012 in response to concerns voiced by lawmakers. The compensation increase announcements were disclosed in separate filings made by Fannie and Freddie with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Average MBS guaranty fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last year were 7 basis points higher than in 2013, but the government-sponsored enterprises were less profitable last year, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The average MBS guaranty fee was 58 bps in 2014, the FHFA reported, up from 51 bps in 2013. Both components of the g-fee – the loan-level upfront fee (15 bps) and the ongoing annual fee (43 bps) were up from the year before. For several years, 15-year mortgages had been more profitable for the GSEs than 30-year loans, so the fee hike in December 2012 was designed to even them out by raising the fees more for 30-year loans. But instead of narrowing the gap, 30-year loans were even more unprofitable last year, the FHFA said in its annual report on g-fee pricing released this week. This biggest factor may have been self-inflicted as both GSEs ...
Residential MBS production continued to gain speed in the second quarter of 2015 while non-mortgage securitization remained strong, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. A total of $419.42 billion of single-family MBS and non-mortgage ABS were issued during the second quarter, an increase of 21.2 percent from the first three months of the year. It was the strongest new issuance total since the third quarter of 2013 and marked the fifth straight quarterly increase since the market hit a cyclical low at the beginning of last year. Most of the gain came from the agency MBS sector, which totaled $352.73 billion in new issuance, a gain of 29.7 percent from the first quarter. All three agencies posted hefty gains, with the biggest coming at Ginnie Mae, where new issuance jumped 46.7 percent to hit $120.36 billion. A lot of Ginnie’s growth is coming from an unusual surge of refinance activity, which accounted for ... [ charts]
Wells Fargo was the top seller to Freddie Mac in 2Q with $12.6 billion, according to newly compiled figures from Inside Mortgage Finance, but BofA was a somewhat close second...
FBR Capital Markets analysts said the ruling allows the CFPB and the Department of Justice to retain their use of disparate impact under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act...
The FHA is either close to achieving full recovery or nearing collapse and needing a potential taxpayer bailout, depending on which of two opposing views is more persuasive. The conflicting views stem from the latest analyses of the FHA’s health conducted by Potomac Partners, a mortgage industry consultancy, and the American Enterprise Institute’s International Center on Housing Risk. Both reports looked into FHA risk, mortgage performance, delinquency rates ...
Capital requirements and standards proposed by state regulators for nonbank servicers appear to be unnecessary, according to trade groups representing servicers. State regulators issued the proposal in March, seeking to ensure that nonbanks conduct their servicing operations in a safe and sound manner and have strong consumer protections in place. “It is not clear that nonbank mortgage servicers require a prudential regulatory regime,” a group of 37 state ...
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