Keefe Bruyette & Woods questioned what would happen if the GSEs were dismantled in its recent financial podcast. Bose George, analyst with KBW, said, given the increase in guaranty fees, it’s clear that at least for higher quality loans, the private sector is ready to price just as competitively. “But we see two risks if the GSEs go away,” he said. George noted that the five trillion dollars worth of GSE MBS guarantees, which currently have no capital behind them, will need capital if that moves over to the banking system. And he said it’s safe to assume that will translate into higher mortgage rates.
Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin’s recent comments that he’s not a fan of recapitalizing and releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and wants to find a “bipartisan solution” to GSE reform has caused speculation about what reform will look like under the Trump administration.The comments, made during his Senate confirmation hearing last week, presented a softer take on housing reform than his earlier comments suggested. Shortly after being ...
Fannie Mae is testing the market for single-family rental homes by backing a large institutional investor for the first time. In an agreement to fund up to $1 billion of collateral owned by Invitation Homes, Fannie, along with Wells Fargo Bank, issued a commitment letter to the Dallas-based company. Invitation, a subsidiary of Blackstone, is the largest single-family rental operation, with a portfolio of close to 50,000 homes that it acquired from foreclosure auctions to fix up and rent.The commitment states that the GSE will be involved in a “securitization transaction” with the SFR operator “to fund a new 10-year fixed rate mortgage loan in a...
A federal court ruled that GSE shareholders can no longer sue Fannie Mae’s accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche, and that the Federal Housing Finance Agency will take over as plaintiff in the Edwards et al v. Deloitte & Touche case. The ruling, handed down last week in the U.S. District Court of Florida, distanced shareholders from the case, and said any claims against Deloitte are the sole responsibility of ...
Freddie Mac recommends that lenders begin preparing now for the Uniform Closing Dataset mandate that takes effect on Sept. 25, 2017. The Federal Housing Finance Agency directed Fannie Mae and Freddie to provide a common industry dataset to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s closing disclosure. As a result, the pair developed the UCD to make sure the disclosures were accurate and to facilitate sharing of the data. Andy Higginbotham, Freddie’s senior vice president of ...
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