Freddie Mac CEO Donald Layton said that home prices have been reasonably strong over the past five years or so, but a new construction lag is what’s really contributing to the lack of affordable housing.He also said there’s been a noticeably higher rate of home price growth than in average or median family income. Layton said, in the long-term, the U.S. has produced 1.5 million housing units a year, both multifamily and single-family. And with a small population growth adjustment, Layton said it should be about 1.6 million a year now. “I believe it has noticeably declined in the financial crisis and it has never returned to that level again,” he said in a phone interview.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General took issue with the way the FHFA oversees Fannie Mae’s corporate governance but said its review process for mortgage servicing rights transfers has greatly improved. The OIG released two audits recently. The first focused on the need for FHFA to pay closer attention to how Fannie handles conflicts with its senior executive officers. The OIG reviewed several Fannie policy documents, including those relating to governance, conflicts of interest and code of ethics procedures. It concluded that Fannie’s governance documents are “internally inconsistent” when it comes to resolving conflicts of interest involving senior executive officers (SEOs).
GSE shareholders seeking to challenge the Federal Housing Finance Agency based on its single-director structure may now face an added challenge. The Federal Housing Finance Agency has asked the courts to review the decision of the DC Circuit in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as it relates to similar complaints against the agency. When a 2016 ruling found that the similarly structured Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not constitutional, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders filed lawsuits asking the courts to vacate the Treasury sweep of GSE profits altogether.
Legislation was recently introduced to allow captive insurance companies, most commonly real estate investment trusts, to restore their memberships with the Federal Home Loan Banks. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-IL, introduced the bipartisan bill along with Sens. Ron Johnson, R-WI, and Tim Scott, R-SC.Any captive insurer that was a member before Jan. 19, 2016, could continue or restore its membership in the system under S. 2361, the Housing Opportunity Mortgage Expansion Act. This would reverse a 2016 final rule that banned captive insurance companies from access to the FHLBanks and said any members that joined the system by way of their captive insurers before the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s proposed rule issued in September 2014 had five years to relinquish their membership.
Fannie Mae re-entered the low-income housing tax credit market and this month closed on a $100 million fund focused on supporting affordable multifamily housing in hurricane-ravaged communities. The GSE collaborated with Raymond James Tax Credit Funds to create the fund. After being absent from the LIHTC market for almost a decade, Fannie closed on the fund on Feb. 5 and said it’s now part of an ongoing effort to provide a reliable source of capital for affordable rental housing and underserved markets. The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced late in the fourth quarter that both Fannie and Freddie Mac are allowed to re-enter the LIHTC market but with limitations so they’re not in direct competition with the private market.
At $600K a Year, Fannie Mae CEO Tim Mayopoulos is Underpaid. Although Fannie Mae reported pre-tax income of $18.4 billion in 2017, its CEO Timothy Mayopoulos took home, once again, a base salary of roughly $600,000, the limit for both GSE CEOs and a figure that seems exceedingly low when compared to financial services firms of similar size. A new 10-K filing from the company notes: “Our chief executive officer’s compensation in 2017 was more than 90 percent below the market median for comparable firms. Our inability to offer market-based compensation hinders our succession planning for our chief executive officer role, and potentially our ability to hire...
The credit box in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lending continued to widen – at a glacial rate – during 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of mortgage-backed securities disclosure data. The easing trend seemed to lose momentum slightly in the fourth quarter, as more government-sponsored enterprise business landed in the middle-risk categories. For the full year, 12.13 percent of GSE purchase loans were in the highest-risk ... [Includes two data charts]
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