Bank Acquitted in Charges of Selling Fannie Bad Mortgages. Abacus Federal Savings Bank was acquitted of grand larceny and conspiracy charges earlier this month from a case bought by the New York District Attorney’s office that involved Fannie Mae. Following a four-month trial, a New York jury acquitted Abacus and two of its senior offices. The Manhattan-based bank, which primarily serves Chinese-Americans in the New York area, was accused of falsifying documents and selling faulty mortgages to Fannie from 2005 to 2010. Freddie Says Look Out for IRS Rejection Messages. To ensure the quality of loans sold to Freddie, the GSE says sellers and servicers must take all appropriate steps to clear red flags typically found in fraud schemes focused...
A relatively small – even microscopic – percentage of loans securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the past three years have been subject to a repurchase demand, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. As of the end of March, lenders had repurchased a total of $2.01 billion of loans that were pooled into mortgage-backed securities by the two government-sponsored enterprises during 2012, 2013 and 2014. That was just ... [Includes two data charts]
Acquiescing to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac repurchase and make-whole demands, the big bank aggregators were more concerned about preserving their business relationship with the government-sponsored enterprises than questioning GSEs’ claims, according to compliance experts. “Indeed, it is often plainly apparent the aggregators have done nothing at all to investigate or research, much less defend against, the demands made on them by ...
There was widespread expectation that the latest round of seller-friendly changes to the government-sponsored enterprises’ representation-and-warranty framework would encourage lenders to liberalize their credit overlays. So far in 2015, the data aren’t showing it. In fact, the case could be made that credit trends are going the other way. The average credit score for purchase mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was...[Includes one data table]
Correspondent originators continued to produce significantly more purchase mortgages as a share of their total production than brokers or retail lenders, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loans securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the first quarter of 2015. Some 55.9 percent of correspondent originations were purchase loans, compared to just 36.5 percent for retail production and 35.1 percent for ... [Includes one data chart]
The Federal Housing Finance Agency settled $10.3 billion in legal claims in 2014 stemming from 11 non-agency MBS issues that go as far back as 10 years ago, noted the FHFA’s annual report to Congress released this week. These lawsuits were filed in 2011 against financial institutions along with some of their executive management including officers and directors. The suits alleged violations of federal securities laws and state laws in the sale of the non-agency MBS to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that took place in a two-year period during the housing downturn between 2005 and 2007. A number of issues contributed...[Includes one data table]
Freddie Mac announced its fifth Structured Agency Credit Risk debt note offering in 2015 this week. This $950 million offering comes on the heels of last week’s STACR offering of $425.6 million, which was the first transaction under a new structure that shares a reference pool of loans with a previous transaction.Last week’s STACR Series 2015-HQ2 has a reference pool of single-family mortgages with an unpaid principal balance of more than $30.3 billion. Freddie said the reference pool consists of a subset of 30-year fixed-rate single-family mortgages acquired by Freddie in the first through third quarters of 2013 with loan-to-value ratios from 80 to 95 percent. Analysts from Moody’s Investors Service said Freddie used part of its 58 percent....
Contributing Treasury’s warrants for common stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the affordable housing funds is one of the ways that the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights says the GSEs can help earmark financial resources toward affordable housing. In a June report published by the Leadership Conference, the organization offered a few of its housing finance recommendations to support affordable housing goals. The report noted that often lost in public discussion of the GSE conservatorships is the fact that the Treasury owns warrants for 79.9 percent of the common stock of both Fannie and Freddie. “The value of the warrants could easily exceed $100 billion,” the group said in its recommendation.
The non-cash share of financing for home purchases increased to 75.2 percent in May, according to results from the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey.
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