A conservative, non-partisan public interest group is considering its options following a recent federal appeals court decision affirming the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s right to withhold documentation revealing the extent of political campaign donations made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.On Aug. 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a lower court ruling against Judicial Watch.
AARP has filed a class action lawsuit against Wells Fargo Bank and Fannie Mae in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco on behalf of reverse mortgage borrowers and their survivors in what it says is an attempt to head off illegal Home Equity Conversion Mortgage foreclosures and evictions.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled against the conservative watch dog group, Judicial Watch, and in favor of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, determining that the FHFA is not required to release documentation revealing the extent to which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have contributed to political campaigns. …
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the U.S. Treasury and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have issued a Request For Information, seeking the industry’s insight on new options for selling current and future single-family real estate owned properties held by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA. The RFI will delve into alternatives for maximizing value to taxpayers while boosting private investment in the housing market, including ways that will support rental and affordable…
The retained mortgage portfolios at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to melt slowly during the second quarter as the government-sponsored enterprises reported significant losses and turned to the federal government for more funding to stay in business. The two GSEs held some $1.416 trillion of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities in portfolio at the end of June, a decrease of 2.3 percent from the first quarter and down 9.0 percent from the same period a year ago. The biggest decline was in unsecuritized home mortgages, down 2.5 percent from the first quarter, while GSE MBS holdings ... [includes one data chart]
The zero risk weight for Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities remains despite Standard & Poor’s recent lowering of the long-term rating of the U.S. government and federal agencies from AAA to AA+ and affirmation of the A-1+ short-term rating, according to federal regulators. The rating agency also removed both the short- and long-term ratings from CreditWatch, where they have been since July 14 with negative implications. On August 5, federal banking and credit union regulators announced that, for risk-based capital purposes, the risk weights for Treasury securities and securities guaranteed by...
Mortgage lenders faced a rising tide of repurchase requests from the secondary market during the second quarter of 2011, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of earnings reports from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two government-sponsored enterprises said they realized $4.1 billion in repurchases and indemnifications during the second quarter, up 46 percent from the first three months of the year. It was the second largest repurchase binge on record, trailing only the $5.9 billion reported for the fourth quarter of 2010. Most of the damage was done by ... [contains one data chart]
Struggling with a run of huge losses well into its fifth year, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now confront the added challenge of worsening financial condition among private mortgage insurers, one of the few backstops the government-sponsored enterprises have to offset some of their losses. Fannie noted in its 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the “current weakened condition” of its mortgage insurer counterparties has created “an increased risk that the insurers will fail to fulfill their obligations” to reimburse the GSE for its ...
Officials testifying before a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing this week came out in strong opposition to eliminating a government guarantee in the MBS market of the future, claiming that such measures would have a significant impact on borrowers’ ability to obtain plain vanilla 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. “Many large investors utilize the MBS market to execute trades driven by macroeconomic views and would not utilize a market which combines credit risk with interest rate risk,” said Andrew Davidson, president of Andrew Davidson & Co., an analytics and consulting firm. “With a smaller investor base, liquidity would be...
Mortgage market watchers and insiders on Capitol Hill report there is little chatter and seemingly even less enthusiasm from the White House to send to the Senate another nominee to serve as the permanent director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.As the FHFA’s Acting Director Edward DeMarco is set to begin his third year as the Finance Agency’s “temporary” head next month, no one among the legislative staffers, trade association officials and industry insiders who spoke with Inside The GSEs said they expect a change in the status quo. But neither did they have anything discouraging to say about his leadership or job performance to date.
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