Congress looks poised to enact its second piece of legislation involving the two government-sponsored enterprises that have been in conservatorship for over seven years. Lawmakers included the “Jumpstart GSE Reform Act” in a fiscal 2016 omnibus spending bill that is expected to be approved late this week. The first piece of GSE legislation enacted by Congress affected just two people, rolling back pay raises awarded to the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac early in 2015. The “Jumpstart” language is more daring by barring the Treasury Department from doing something it has no intention of doing: selling its preferred stock in the GSEs without Congressional approval. The original Jumpstart legislation, sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, Mark Warner, D-VA, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, also would have blocked...

The second month of operations under the new integrated disclosure rule showed some divergence in closing trends for home-purchase mortgage financing compared with all-cash transactions. In November, there was an increase in the share of purchase mortgages that missed their scheduled closing dates and a slight increase in closing times compared with October, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. Some real estate agents responding to the survey pointed...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency will push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to assess front-end risk-sharing strategies in 2016, according to the agency’s game plan for the two government-sponsored enterprises released late this week. At this point, most of the work appears to be exploratory. The FHFA itself will issue a formal “request for input” from the industry, and the GSEs are expected “to conduct an analysis and assessment of front-end credit risk transfer.” The 2016 “scorecard” pushes...

The CHLA is renewing its call for Treasury and the FHFA to amend the preferred stock purchase agreements once again, allowing the GSEs to build capital...

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo was the top-ranked ARM lender through three quarters in 2015 with $18.83 billion funded. PHH Mortgage was a somewhat close second...

Fannie and Freddie have securitized roughly 80.8 percent of conventional-conforming mortgages over the first nine months of the year.

In the past, the duty to serve rule has received a great deal of attention from manufactured housing executives who argue the GSEs are not purchasing enough of their loans.

The Golden State accounted for $19.4 billion of VA loans in Ginnie pools at the end of the nine-month period. The Old Dominion State accounted for $10.1 billion in VA loans in Ginnie MBS.

Compass Point predicts the measure now has a 40 percent to 60 percent chance of passage under the omnibus spending bill.

There is limited good news to report for lenders in terms of industry efforts to secure regulatory relief from a variety of rules from the CFPB. Among the good news is that the transportation funding legislation that President Obama is expected to sign shortly includes language that will grant the CFPB greater flexibility to treat a balloon loan as a “qualified mortgage” if it was extended by a community bank or creditor operating in rural or underserved areas. Other language will institute a process for banks and other stakeholders to petition the bureau to designate an area as “rural” or “underserved” for the purposes of the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rule. Another provision will expand the bureau’s ability to exempt creditors serving ...