Fannie’s board soon will begin its search for a new CEO – a position that will need the blessing of its largest shareholder, the U.S. Treasury Department.
Fannie’s board soon will begin its search for a new CEO – a position that will need the blessing of its largest shareholder, the U.S. Treasury Department.
Although a number of large banks have recently shown more interest in the secondary market for mortgage servicing rights, there is no sign that the migration toward nonbanks is ending. A new Inside The GSEs analysis of mortgage-backed securities data shows that independent mortgage bankers increased their holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MSR by 2.0 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2018. Depository institutions recorded an 0.5 percent decline in GSE servicing rights over the same period. Most of the bank shrinkage came from the four institutions with over $1 trillion in total assets. Although Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup still held a whopping...
A federal court held this week that the single-director structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by Director Mel Watt, violates the constitution. The ruling in Collins v. FHFA was handed down in Texas by a three judge-panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. It represents the most recent major ruling in a number of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholder cases filed against the federal government. “We found, after an in-depth examination, that the FHFA is excessively insulated from executive branch influence and is, therefore, structured in violation of the Constitution,” the judges state in their 83-page ruling. And although Congress can create an independent agency, the court determined that elected officials cannot insulate...
Fannie Mae’s new mortgage insurance pilot announced last week is troubling to mortgage insurers who continue to question the GSEs’ blurring of lines between primary and secondary markets. Fannie’s Enterprise-Paid Mortgage Insurance program is billed as just a way to give lenders another option for obtaining mortgage insurance for high loan-to-value loans. Under the pilot, Fannie will arrange primary MI coverage for existing private MIs or a panel of affiliated reinsurers. Fannie said the new option allows the GSE to streamline the operational requirements of participating lenders, increase the certainty of coverage and better manage Fannie’s counterparty risk. Fannie officials explained that they expect traditional mortgage insurance to be the primary cover for loans with LTVs over 80 percent.
The Milken Institute said the GSEs’ duty-to-serve policy is more complicated than other affordable housing reform issues because it forces the secondary market to boost lending in the primary market and assumes those private firms are underperforming. The conservative think tank published a paper this week authored by Michael Stegman and Phillip Swagel on the role of duty-to-serve in which it examined the policy and its potential impact on the mortgage market. While DTS currently encompasses manufactured housing, rural housing and affordable housing preservation, Milken said housing finance reform debates have centered on creating a DTS that includes areas beyond those three targets.
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