The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president may open a path out of conservatorship for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some investors in the two government-sponsored enterprises believe. According to interviews conducted with GSE investors, industry lobbyists, trade group officials and others, a “recap and release” plan backed by the junior preferred shareholders of Fannie and Freddie could formally be presented to the Trump administration early next year. There hasn’t...
The Federal Communications Commission last week denied a request from the Mortgage Bankers Association to exempt calls from mortgage servicers to borrowers from provisions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Officials at the MBA said the denial was unexpected. Among other issues, the petition had received some support from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The TCPA and FCC rules prohibit...
President-elect Donald Trump’s business background could help address two of the biggest challenges confronting the housing finance industry today: limited credit availability and a shortage in the supply of the housing stock, according to Laurie Goodman, director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. “Mortgage credit availability is an issue we have repeatedly written about,” said Goodman in a recent online blog post. Some of her previous research has shown that “the market is taking less than half the credit risk it was taking during 2001, a period of reasonable credit standards,” she noted. And other HFPC research has shown...
The baseline conforming loan limit for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will climb to $424,100 in 2017, the first such increase since 2006. The 1.7 percent increase reflected a gain in the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s expanded-data house price index at the end of the third quarter. The new ceiling for high-cost markets will...
Fairholme Funds officials this week continued to press their case for restoring shareholder rights for private investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, expressing hope that the incoming Trump administration will be friendlier to their cause. In Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al, the plaintiffs argue that the net worth sweep imposed by the Treasury Department and Federal Housing Finance Agency was illegal and that the two government-sponsored enterprises were not in a “death spiral” at the time of the bailout as the government claims. During a conference call this week, Fairholme CEO Bruce Berkowitz said...
Bank mortgage repurchase activity rose again in the third quarter of 2016, although most of the increase is tied to Bank of America clearing up old buyback issues. Commercial banks and savings institutions reported $884.4 million in single-family mortgage repurchases and indemnifications during the third quarter. That was up 10.0 percent from the previous period and marked the third consecutive quarterly increase in repurchase activity ... [Includes one data chart]
The government-sponsored enterprises’ credit-risk transfer programs have been wildly popular with investors and many policymakers, but other industry observers see problems. One of the most outspoken critics is Tim Howard, a former Fannie Mae CFO, who sees a big difference between today’s CRT programs and the GSEs’ traditional method of laying off credit risk before they were taken into government conservatorship. “When I was at Fannie, the companies purchased...
Three financial-industry trade associations submitted a joint amici brief to the Supreme Court of the U.S. seeking an end to the confusion over whether extender statutes that refer only to the “statute of limitations” should apply to the “statute of repose” as well. The circuit courts are split on the issue, with four courts deviating from a 2014 SCOTUS ruling in CTS v. Waldburger, in which property owners tried to hold CTS Corp., operator of an electronic plant in North Carolina, liable for damages from toxic contaminants on the land. The property owners filed...
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