Government attorneys sought to block Howard’s access on the grounds that he owns Fannie shares and would be biased.

Waiting several years to unify Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities into a single MBS could pose a huge risk to its successful completion, warned the mortgage banking industry, but Wall Street thinks it’s worth the wait to get market participants totally behind the move. The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s proposed single security for the government-sponsored enterprises met with conflicting views as the comment period ended this week. The proposal is aimed at eliminating Freddie’s pricing disadvantage and improving liquidity in the to-be-announced market. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association urged...

In the second quarter REITs increased their investments in MBS by 9.7 percent on a sequential basis – the largest increase among any investor type tracked by IM&A.

Bill Dallas, who runs Skyline Lending, told us he believes the “new” non-agency movement is beginning right now. “Today, we‘re doing 90 percent agency,” he said. “In 2017 the ratio will be 60 percent agency.”

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.