Time is not a friend to the housing finance system so long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain in government conservatorship with no endgame in sight, according to the former head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Former FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco, now a senior fellow in residence for the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets, told attendees at this week’s Bipartisan Policy Council’s housing summit in Washington that the ongoing conservatorships of the two government-sponsored enterprises – now in the sixth year – will continue to distort the market and place taxpayers at risk. “The conservatorships are...
The Finance Agency filed suit against HSBC and 17 other firms in 2011. The two remaining defendants in the cases include Nomura Holdings and the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
A number of firms that hold vintage non-agency mortgage-backed securities are using their clean-up call options as the outstanding balance in the MBS dwindles. Executing clean-up calls can be more profitable for certain firms than allowing securities to run-off. Chimera Investment is the latest firm to tout its clean-up call strategy. The real estate investment trust said it acquired the rights to $4.8 billion of seasoned subprime mortgages by purchasing subordinate tranches of non-agency MBS issued by Springleaf Finance between 2011 and 2013. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed.
MBS industry observers had hoped that federal banking regulators would clear up any confusion about the treatment of collateralized mortgage obligations and real estate mortgage investment conduits when they finalized new liquidity coverage ratio rules last week. The regulators gave some hints, but did not spell out a position. The rubber will meet the road when examiners start going over individual banks’ portfolios for compliance with the LCR rule, which requires banks to maintain sufficient quantities of highly liquid assets to meet their cash needs in a financial emergency. The final rule classifies...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s “single security” proposal for generic Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS is “well-thought out” and “worthy of serious consideration,” but the agency should pick up the pace in its implementation to avoid making the solution part of the problem, according to a paper by the Urban Institute. Laurie Goodman, director of the UI’s Housing Policy Center, and Lewis Ranieri, chairman of Ranieri Partners, expressed concern that the FHFA “may be contemplating a slower pace in the project than it warrants.” The FHFA last month issued...
Six years after the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the former regulator of the government-sponsored enterprises noted that the housing finance system has made “significant progress.” But even as critical structural changes are underway, comprehensive improvement is still several years out. In a policy paper issued last week, Edward DeMarco – new senior fellow-in-residence for the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets – said that house prices, as measured by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have recovered more than 50 percent since their decline in 2007. “While the damage from the housing crisis has been substantial, we are finally seeing...
Redwood Trust’s planned $329.95 million jumbo mortgage-backed security is the second straight MBS from the issuer to have adequate geographic diversity, according to Fitch Ratings. Almost every jumbo MBS issued since 2010 has taken a hit from default expectations and had higher credit enhancement because of geographic concentration. Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2014-3 is scheduled to be issued around Sept. 19. Fitch, Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Moody’s Investors Service gave the deal preliminary triple-A ratings with credit enhancement of 6.55 percent on the top-rated tranche. The credit enhancement level is one of the lowest in recent years on jumbo MBS backed by 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. It is particularly low considering that due diligence was completed on less than 100 percent of the loans, and the MBS will include two loans that do not meet standards for qualified mortgages.
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