GSE shareholder advocates remain undeterred following a federal judge’s decision late this week to deny a former Fannie Mae executive access to confidential evidence unearthed as part of the discovery process in an investors’ lawsuit against the government. Earlier this year, Fairholme Funds hired former Fannie Chief Financial Officer Timothy Howard as a consultant to assist its law firm Coopers and Kirk. Lawyers for the government want to deny Howard access to some 800,000 pieces of discovery in investors’ litigation challenging Uncle Sam’s “net-worth sweep” of GSE profits.

In October of last year Pershing Square, the hedge fund controlled by uber investor Bill Ackman, began gobbling up huge blocks of common stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at prices ranging from $1.54 to $2.27 a share. Today, a small portion of those positions is underwater, but thanks to a recent rebound in the stocks, whatever “paper” losses Pershing Square incurred have just about been wiped out. In trading Thursday, Fannie common was selling for $2.14, Freddie a few pennies below that.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s proposed single security for the GSEs met with conflicting views as the comment period ended this week. In August, the FHFA proposed a single-security structure to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to issue a common MBS to serve the single-family market. The proposal is aimed at eliminating Freddie’s pricing disadvantage and improving liquidity in the to-be-announced market.

After a year of searching for a chief executive to lead Common Securitization Solutions, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is still looking, but it continues to hire staff. “The search continues,” said a government official close to the matter. “We even have a search firm.”Although the FHFA is keeping a tight lid on information regarding CSS, it’s now common knowledge that the search firm in question is the Washington-based Spencer Stuart, which bills itself as “one of the world’s leading global executive search and leadership consulting firms.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency “should not appreciably change” guaranty fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to a new paper by Moody’s Analytics. The paper, “A General Theory of G-Fees,” by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and Cristian deRitis, a senior director of consumer credit analytics, noted that the two GSEs are currently charging an average g-fee of approximately 60 basis points across all new loans they insure.

The Government Accountability Office took the Federal Housing Finance Agency to task last week for its less-than-transparent policy direction regarding guaranty fees. The wide-ranging report on housing finance reform efforts noted that the FHFA’s opaque position makes it difficult to hold the regulator accountable. “The lack of clearly stated goals for FHFA that recognize the potential trade-off between bringing private capital back into the market and making mortgage credit available has led to inconsistency in [the FHFA’s] policy on the level of guaranty fees on mortgage-backed securities issued by the enterprises,” the GAO said.

In a 2-to-1 decision earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that tossed out state-law claims brought against Fannie Mae by homeowners fighting foreclosure proceedings. Homeowners in Lightfoot et al v. Cedant Mortgage Corp. et al sued Fannie and others in California state court after foreclosure proceedings were initiated against their homes. The homeowners filed the state court action after their prior federal claims were dismissed in federal district court.

In an unusual move, a Washington, DC, think tank has publicly taken to task the official watchdog of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, finding a recent audit of the FHFA’s representation-and-warranty policy “incomplete.” The September report by the FHFA’s Inspector General concluded that the Finance Agency’s implementation of the rep-and-warrant framework was premature and resulted in “significant and unresolved operational risks” to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. An analysis by the Urban Institute found that the OIG’s conclusions were “incomplete and overstate the risk of the plan.”

IG Recommends FHFA Upgrade Its Recordkeeping. The Federal Housing Finance Agency is in compliance with its recordkeeping procedures but the policy and infrastructure of its records management could do with an upgrade, concluded an evaluation by FHFA’s Inspector General last week. The IG said that the Finance Agency’s Division of Enterprise Regulation’s recordkeeping practices “have limitations that impede the efficient retrieval” of examination workpapers by agency staff and by IG auditors.