The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee is moving closer to beginning what is likely to be a long and drawn-out process to gradually and predictably unwind the U.S. central bank’s huge portfolio of agency MBS and debt – the sooner, the better, according to Fed chief Janet Yellen. “The FOMC intends to gradually reduce the Federal Reserve’s securities holdings by decreasing its reinvestment of the principal payments it receives from the securities held in the System Open Market Account,” she said this week in her semi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony on monetary policy to members of Congress. “Specifically, such payments will be reinvested...

The average daily trading volume of agency MBS reached $209.9 billion in June, the second highest reading of the year and a sign that liquidity is picking up, according to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The increase in trading comes despite the fact that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a total of $317.7 billion of new MBS in the second quarter, a 6.1 percent decline from the first quarter. For the six-month period, 2017 holds the edge with volume up 3.5 percent. But it hasn’t been...

As talks intensify on how to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of limbo, smaller lenders are clamoring to make sure they have a say in how housing-finance reform plays out. Nearly all sides agree that small lenders should continue to have access to the secondary market; how that’s accomplished is a different matter. The Main Street GSE Reform Coalition – an umbrella group made up of small-lender and community-advocacy groups – wants the government-sponsored enterprises to begin rebuilding capital buffers by suspending their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. It also wants...

The proposal to restructure the credit-risk transfer debt-note programs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make them more attractive to real estate investment trusts likely won’t have a negative impact on the credit risk and quality of those deals, Morningstar said in a new report. The proposed changes to Fannie’s Connecticut Avenue Securities and Freddie’s Structured Agency Credit Risk programs would characterize them as real estate mortgage investment conduits. This would allow REITs and some overseas investors to participate more broadly in the programs. Currently, the structure of the government-sponsored enterprises’ popular CRT programs doesn’t meet...

The Invictus Opportunity Fund recently raised $35.56 million in capital.

According to Fairholme’s math, the GSEs earn over $15 billion a year, and taxpayers own 80 percent of the companies (via the senior preferred). Berkowitz values the senior stock at $100 billion…

With refinance activity tapering off, the retail production channel lost some of its edge during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities. Retail production accounted for 50.6 percent of the $290.63 billion of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae in the second quarter. Including modified loans and those with no channel identification ... [Includes one data chart]

Mortgage firms of all types continued to add to their payrolls late this spring, with many firms reporting they’re searching for technology workers. Overall, nonbank lender/servicers added 1,400 full-time positions in May, bringing total sector employment to 242,900 positions, the best reading since December 2007, according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Separately, loan brokerage companies also added 1,400 jobs during the month, bringing their employment ...

The national average credit score tracked by Fair Isaac (FICO) recently reached a record high in April: 700. And the share of consumers seeking new credit is actually declining, according to an analysis by FICO. Ethan Dornhelm, a senior principal scientist in the analytic development group at FICO, noted that the average FICO score as of April was 10 points higher than the reading in October 2006, before the financial crisis. Average scores fell to 686 in October 2009 and have ...

Direct-mail advertising campaigns touting refinances help prompt borrowers to refi, according to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve. They added that policymakers should consider making it easier for lenders to target borrowers for refis. Seran Grundl and You Suk Kim, economists at the Fed, authored a recent working paper that examined how borrowers react to receiving ads in the mail for refinances. They said the effect of advertising on consumer mistakes and ...