With housing finance reform legislation effectively stalled just short of a Senate floor vote, the industry is beginning to shift its expectant gaze to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to take the initiative as the debate moves toward GSE preservation. Although the reform bill, S. 1217, by Sens. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Mike Crapo, R-ID, cleared the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee earlier this month, its less than impressive 13-9 vote margin all but ensures that Senate leadership will ignore the measure’s bid for a floor vote through the remainder of the 113th Congress.
Mortgage servicing rights will never trade as freely as mortgage-backed securities, but agency officials say they are considering ways to facilitate the increasingly active MSR market. “The market is undergoing tremendous changes with great opportunities in mortgage servicing,” said Bob Ryan, a special advisor at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, during last week’s Secondary Market Conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. “It has attracted ...
Issuance of agency MBS has dropped off in the past year due to a decline in the supply of refinances. However, industry analysts expect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will boost the supply of agency MBS with issuance backed by modified mortgages and re-performing loans. Fannie and Freddie could have $250 billion in modified mortgages on their balance sheets, according to estimates by Deutsche Bank Securities. The two government-sponsored enterprises will likely unload the holdings via securitization, prompted by portfolio reduction goals established by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie has been...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cannot remain safely in conservatorship indefinitely, and they cannot get out from under Uncle Sam’s protection without “cataclysmic” consequences to the government-sponsored enterprises, MBS investors and the market, according to a new Urban Institute study. While the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the White House can make minor changes administratively, the UI paper notes it would take an act of Congress to authorize substantial revisions to the GSEs’ bailout agreement. “They can take...
Building the new common securitization platform for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be the easy part. Plugging in the two government-sponsored enterprises is another story. Through the end of last year, the two GSEs had spent about $65 million to build the CSP, according to a report by the Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The IG estimated that Fannie and Freddie this year are spending about $6 million a month to continue that work. In fact, neither the GSEs nor the FHFA have yet come up...
Bank and thrift MBS holdings were up a modest 1.0 percent from the previous quarter, but it marked the first increase since the third quarter of 2012, when the Federal Reserve began aggressively buying agency MBS and Treasury securities.
A lack of overwhelming support in the Senate for legislation to reform the government-sponsored enterprises has shifted the housing finance policy debate from reform to preservation. If Congress fails to act, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is set to drive mortgage policy for years to come. Sens. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Mike Crapo, R-ID, initially delayed the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs’ recent markup of S. 1217, the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act, in an effort to increase support for the GSE reform bill. But they failed to gain favor with a number of liberal members of the committee, and the bill ultimately passed on a 13-9 vote seen as dooming prospects for comprehensive action on GSE reform in Congress. Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, were...
Look for the various lawsuits filed by private owners of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock against the federal government to take a “very long time to be decided,” as the courts may take up to a year to resolve just the introductory motions, according to a legal expert. Beyond that, the litigation over shares in the two government-sponsored enterprises could stretch out to the U.S. Supreme Court. Brooklyn Law School Professor David Reiss, speaking during a Bloomberg Industries webinar last week, noted that lawsuits stemming from the savings and loan debacle of 20 years ago give a sense of the possible timeframe, but litigation brought by disenfranchised Fannie and Freddie investors against the government offers an entirely different and deeper set of legal complexities. “These are...
All the major mortgage product categories saw declines in new originations during the first quarter, but the jumbo and home-equity sectors held up slightly better, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. The conventional-conforming sector took the biggest hit, as new production dropped 25.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2013 to an estimated $123 billion in the first three months of this year. The vast majority of these loans still end up being financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the two government-sponsored enterprises continue to draw a lot of their business from the ebbing refinance market. Fannie and Freddie securitized...[Includes two data charts]
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