CFPB Poised to Commence Five-Year Review of Its Major Mortgage Rules. The CFPB is getting ready to start, as per the Dodd-Frank Act, its five-year evaluation of some of the significant mortgage rulemakings it has promulgated thus far, according to a recent account by Politico, as cited by Pavitra Bacon, an associate in the Washington, DC, office of the Ballard Spahr law firm, in an online blog posting.... Will We See CHOICE Act 2.0 This Week? With less than a week left before the end of March, one well-placed industry lobbyist is still holding to the prediction that Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, will in fact introduce another incarnation of his Financial CHOICE act by the end of the month....
Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw a huge drop in the volume of repurchases and other indemnifications in 2016, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of disclosure reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During the fourth quarter of 2016, lenders repurchased just $207.31 million of home loans, a 37.0 percent decline from the third quarter. That brought total repurchases to $1.101 billion last year, down 35.9 percent from 2015. Those are record lows in the contentious recent history of GSE buyback demands. Fannie and Freddie, along with other “asset securitizers,” began filing quarterly repurchase reports with the SEC in early...
Vice President Mike Pence’s chief economist said the Trump administration is working on GSE reform principles. The comments came this week during a government relations summit hosted by the American Bankers Association. Mark Calabria, former director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, caused a media frenzy when during a general session he said that a “set of principles” on GSE reform is likely to emerge in the coming months. Calabria is not a proponent of the GSEs, and believes that without Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, commercial banks would step in to fill the liquidity void for the simple reason they have so much in the way of “excess reserves.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced this week that it moved back the anticipated date of “release 2” of the common securitization platform in which both GSEs will use the security, to the second quarter of 2019, instead of 2018. In a progress report update, the FHFA said it decided to delay the project after an “extensive review” of lessons learned from the first release and progress on release 2. The agency said it needs more time for the development, testing, validation of controls, and governance necessary “to have the highest level of confidence that the implementation will be both smooth and successful.”
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