Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both active this week with multifamily MBS transactions, but they’ll have to double-time it if they plan to match last year’s levels. The odds are against them. Fannie’s multifamily new business volume came to $13.8 billion through August 2014, compared with $20.4 billion the year before. The government-sponsored enterprise would have to crank out another $15 billion in the last four months of 2014 to match the 2013 total of $28.8 billion. For rival Freddie, multifamily new business activity totaled...

Commercial banks hate mortgages. No, they don't. Yes, they do. No they don't. Yes, they do...

Congress should put the screws to the Treasury Department to disclose all documents pertaining to the origins of the Obama administration’s controversial “net-worth sweep” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits, according to a coalition of right-leaning public policy groups. In a letter dispatched late this week to the top Republican and Democrat of the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, the 17 groups led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute urged lawmakers to intervene to impose transparency over what GSE shareholders consider an extra-legal maneuver by the executive branch.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not ready for the new representation and warranty framework that took effect early last year at the insistence of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to a new Inspector General audit. Announced in September 2012 and implemented Jan. 1, 2013, the framework relieved sellers from certain reps and warrants, including those relating to credit underwriting and eligibility of the borrower and the property that were formerly effective for the life of the loan.

The ongoing uncertainty about the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is weighing on the mortgage industry and it’s only going to get worse with time, said the former head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency this week. Edward DeMarco, now a senior fellow in residence for the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets, warned that with the government in effective control of the mortgage market, the risk grows of capital allocation and pricing decisions made through the prism of political calculation rather than due to sound, market driven principle.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s most recent settlement of non-agency mortgage-backed securities lawsuit has one consumer group seeing red as it claims taxpayers will ultimately get stuck with the cost of the bank’s multi-million dollar payout. Late last week, the FHFA announced a $550 million legal deal with HSBC North American Holdings, leaving just two civil cases tied to nonprime MBS issuance still unresolved.

There is little enthusiasm in the mortgage market for higher guaranty fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, various industry groups indicated in input letters to the GSEs’ regulator. In June, the Federal Housing Finance Agency issued a call for public comment on how the GSEs should calculate g-fees and whether the FHFA should proceed with a 10 basis point g-fee hike announced last year. In one of his first acts as FHFA director in January, Mel Watt postponed the g-fee hike pending further study.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s proposed capital requirements for private mortgage insurers would raise costs for borrowers but there is a need for new standards, according to industry group comments. The Mortgage Bankers Association, National Association of Realtors and several private MI companies have urged the Federal Housing Finance Agency to ease proposed capital requirements for private MIs.

Most mortgage lenders expect profit margins to remain steady in coming months, but more of them are bracing for reduced earnings and fewer anticipate increases than in the past, according to results from a Fannie Mae survey released this week. Just over half (51 percent) of the 185 participants said they expect profit margins on loan production activity to be unchanged in the next three months. But a third of the lenders predicted tighter margins, up from 29 percent in the previous survey, mostly because of ...

The Senate’s housing finance reform bill would save the government some $60 billion over 10 years according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the windfall, say critics. Earlier this month, the CBO issued its estimate, which concluded that replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a new securitization program that couples a first-loss position for private capital with back-end government insurance could reduce “direct spending” by $60 billion over the 2015-2024 period.