Despite intense lobbying and political pressure from the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced this week it will hold fast to its original conclusion and not agree to Treasury Department requests to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer principal forgiveness modifications. Despite the incentives offered by Treasury to pay the government-sponsored enterprises to write down principal under the Home Affordable Modification Program using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco concluded the benefits of implementing HAMP’s Principal Reduction Alternative did not outweigh the risks to the taxpayer-backed GSEs. “Given our multiple responsibilities to conserve the assets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, maximize assistance to homeowners to avoid foreclosures, and minimize the expense of such assistance to taxpayers, FHFA concluded...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have adopted a “common language” to improve and help ease lenders’ delivery of loans and appraisals to the government-sponsored enterprises. The GSEs’ full adoption of the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset (ULDD) on July 23 establishes a common usage and standardizes most of the data required at the time of loan delivery, minimizing differences wherever possible. Freddie Mac hailed the new system as a “critical milestone” of the Uniform Mortgage Data Program, a joint GSE initiative to provide...

A “bad bank” entity for pooling and standardized restructuring and resecuritization of underwater mortgages may be the best bet for the housing market to pull itself out of the negative equity quagmire of the last several years, according to a proposal by a Georgetown University law professor. In his white paper – Clearing the Mortgage Market Through Principal Reduction: A Bad Bank for Housing RTC 2.0 – Adam Levitin makes the case that the best option for “clearing the market” lies via “negotiated, quasi-voluntary principal reduction” using a privately funded Resolution Trust Corporation-style entity. “Such an RTC 2.0 would provide a framework for implementing ‘quasi-voluntary’ principal reductions in the context of litigation or regulatory settlement or the federal government’s exercise of its secondary market power to exclude...

Subsidiaries of Nationstar Mortgage Holdings announced last week that they intended to sell $100 million in senior notes to help fund future acquisitions and transfers of servicing portfolios, including the potential acquisition of certain servicing assets from Residential Capital. The notes were sold this week in a private placement. The notes are a “follow-on” issue to $275 million in senior notes the company issued in April, due in 2019. Nationstar said the additional notes were issued at an offering price of 105.500 percent, they have an effective yield of 8.396 percent and carry a coupon of 9.625 percent per annum, payable semi-annually in arrears, beginning in November 2012. In May, Nationstar announced that it would pay...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is exploring the possibilities of a streamlined lender-placed or “force-placed” insurance policy between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “FHFA is keenly interested in costs associated with force-placed insurance and related impacts to borrowers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the taxpayer,” a Finance Agency spokesman told Inside The GSEs. “We are looking at policy related to force-placed insurance to see where there might be opportunities to reduce costs.” Some existing force-placed policies are controversial because they are sold by insurance companies owned by lenders or by insurers with which the lenders have a financial relationship.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency must improve its risk assessments of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s real estate-owned properties to provide more comprehensive coverage of GSE risk areas, according to an audit by the agency’s official watchdog. In risk assessments of Fannie and Freddie conducted between 2008 and 2011, the FHFA noted that the GSEs’ large REO inventories were a “critical concern” – the agency’s most severe rating. However, the OIG noted that the agency didn’t perform any targeted examinations of Fannie and Freddie’s management and marketing of REO until 2011. Earlier this year, the FHFA completed four targeted examinations focused on GSE REO risks. The first two examinations focused on risks arising from Fannie and Freddie’s use of vendors to manage REO and the other two examinations looked at their efforts to mitigate losses from “problematic properties,” noted the OIG.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency should enhance its supervision of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks by taking better advantage of the FHFA’s call report system, a recent audit has concluded. The FHFA’s Office of Inspector General report noted last week that despite requiring the GSEs to enter data into the CRS, the Finance Agency has not “optimized its use of the system” to enhance oversight. “Two FHFA supervisory divisions rarely use CRS in their analysis and oversight of the enterprises,” explained the OIG audit. “Instead, they receive routine submissions of loan-level data and standard management reports containing relevant metrics and data.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency may pursue its residential mortgage-backed securities legal action against affiliates of Residential Capital LLC, Ally Financial’s defunct mortgage unit, a federal judge has ruled. Last week, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied ResCap’s request seeking an automatic bankruptcy stay of its numerous MBS lawsuits, including one filed by the FHFA last year. The FHFA, as GSE conservator, sued UBS Americas in July 2011 alleging that billions of dollars of MBS purchased by Fannie and Freddie were based on offering documents that contained “materially false statements and omissions.”

Fannie Mae is immune from punitive damage claims brought by a former staffer in her wrongful termination suit against the company as long as the GSE is under the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a federal judge ruled last week. The ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a major setback for Caroline Herron, a former Fannie vice president who left in 2007 but returned as a consultant in 2009. Herron filed suit against the GSE in June 2010, claiming she was wrongly fired for reporting what she said was Fannie’s mismanagement of the Obama administration’s housing rescue initiatives and grossly wasting public funds.

California remains the top source of new single-family mortgages for Fannie and Freddie, even as Fannie remains the dominant GSE in terms of production through the first half of the year, according to an Inside The GSEs analysis. A total of $132.2 billion of home loans on Golden State properties were securitized by the two GSEs during the first six months of 2012, accounting for 22.9 percent of their total business for the half year. That was up 46.7 percent from total California production during the first six months of 2011 as the overall GSE market rose 38.8 percent from a year ago.