Comments made Wednesday by the Treasury Department’s point man on GSE reform, Michael Stegman, did not go unnoticed by employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
One servicing advisor told IMFnews that the regulator “now has the last word on all MSR transfer approvals. It began in December and has slowed the process a bit.”
The hunger for GSE speculation is also causing some investors to buy Fannie/Freddie common which has been rising of late, but not by much. However, one GSE watcher believes that buying the common, "is a fool’s game."
In other words, the White House still wants to dismantle Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and doesn't seem to care about all the money the two are returning to the government.
The change resulted in the cessation of dividend payments by the GSEs to Treasury, replacing it with a “sweep” of all almost net profits earned by Fannie and Freddie.
Refinance mortgages accounted for 80.1 percent of agency production back in 2012, but that declined to 65.6 percent last year and just 45.3 percent of fourth-quarter business.
Fannie Mae this week priced its second capital markets risk-sharing transaction, offering a total of $750 million in tranches for sale based off a reference pool of $29.31 billion in agency mortgages. The deal uses the same synthetic structure seen on previous risk-sharing transactions from the government-sponsored enterprises. Edward DeMarco, the former acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had been pushing the GSEs to issue risk-sharing deals using a senior-subordinate structure that would not be eligible for the to-be announced market. With Mel Watt now the director of the FHFA, non-TBA risk-sharing transactions from the GSEs could be even less likely. Laurel Davis, vice president for credit risk transfer at Fannie, said...
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