Efforts to reduce the government-sponsored enterprises’ footprint using guaranty fees and loan limits should be left to Congress, according to Bob Ryan, a special advisor to the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Meanwhile, officials at the Treasury Department suggest that the FHFA does have a role in setting policy that will inform any housing finance reform action by Congress. In comments this week at the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network in Miami Beach, Ryan said the FHFA looks to Congress for direction when considering how to run the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “There is nothing in the legislation that suggests the FHFA should shrink the footprint [of the GSEs],” he said. Ryan said...
With loan originations beginning to taper off this fall and expected to continue that way through yearend, lenders of different stripes likely will step up their sales of mortgage servicing rights in an attempt to make earnings projections. “There’s a ton of activity out there now,” said Tom Piercy, managing member of Interactive Mortgage Advisors, Denver, an MSR advisory and brokerage firm. “We’re the busiest we’ve ever been all year.” Mark Garland, president of MountainView Servicing Group, concurs...
Attorneys for a group of disenfranchised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac junior shareholders have joined another shareholder group’s motion in federal court asking the government to come clean with all of the documents and records regarding the Treasury’s “Third Amendment” and “net-worth sweep” of nearly all government-sponsored enterprises’ profits. In papers filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Perry Capital lead attorney Ted Olson asked to join Fairholme Fund’s request for “supplementation” of the record. Both plaintiffs contend the government has failed to provide for court review of the “whole record” as required under the Administrative Procedures Act. “The government is...
The non-agency MBS market remains stuck in the post-crisis doldrums, showing no signs of recovering, according to experts participating at this week’s Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Summit in Washington, DC. Efforts to ignite the growth in non-agency securitization channels to help reduce the government’s role in housing finance and draw back private capital have produced little result. Except for sporadic twitches, thanks to a smattering of deals backed by jumbo loans, the non-agency MBS market is barely alive, panelists said. The government, which is working to revive the non-agency market, sees...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both active this week with multifamily MBS transactions, but they’ll have to double-time it if they plan to match last year’s levels. The odds are against them. Fannie’s multifamily new business volume came to $13.8 billion through August 2014, compared with $20.4 billion the year before. The government-sponsored enterprise would have to crank out another $15 billion in the last four months of 2014 to match the 2013 total of $28.8 billion. For rival Freddie, multifamily new business activity totaled...
Congress should put the screws to the Treasury Department to disclose all documents pertaining to the origins of the Obama administration’s controversial “net-worth sweep” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits, according to a coalition of right-leaning public policy groups. In a letter dispatched late this week to the top Republican and Democrat of the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, the 17 groups led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute urged lawmakers to intervene to impose transparency over what GSE shareholders consider an extra-legal maneuver by the executive branch.
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