Despite four years of effort by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, members of the Federal Home Loan Bank system have made only marginal improvements in diversity on their boards, according to a report released late last month by the Government Accountability Office.
A class action lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late last month, alleges that several of the dominant dealers in the debt instruments of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac colluded in a systematic price-fixing scheme between at least January 1, 2009, and April 27, 2014.
There are some worrying trends buried in the tables of Freddie Mac’s quarterly refinance statistics for 2018. This, of course, is just a small slice of the economic pie, but the data have all the hallmarks of another housing bubble.
In early March, just before the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association voted in favor of allowing the uniform mortgage-backed security for delivery in the to-be-announced market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hosted a conference.
Freddie Mac will restructure all future credit-risk transfer offerings through its flagship Structured Agency Credit Risk program as real estate mortgage investment conduits, Kevin Palmer, senior vice president for single-family credit risk transfer, said.
Mortgage sellers repurchased just $833.7 mil-lion of single-family loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities last year, according to a new Inside the GSEs analysis. [Includes one data chart.]
Late last month, Bloomberg reported that Kushner Cos., the real estate investment firm owned by the family of President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, was in negotiations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for as much a $1.15 billion in loans. Some facts, though, make it difficult to know if the story is accurate.
When the Federal Reserve has finally “normalized” its balance sheet, allowing much of the $4.25 trillion in Treasuries and agency securities that it acquired through quantitative easing to gradually run off, there will still be as much as $1 trillion on the ledger, according to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last week.
Last month, a pair of watchdog organizations asked the inspectors general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Department of the Treasury to investigate whether media leaks by officials at FHFA or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were part of an insider trading scheme.
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