The silver lining in the 2Q numbers is a strengthening home-purchase market. Fannie and Freddie securitized $81.7 billion of home-purchase mortgages during the second quarter, their highest quarterly volume since the second quarter of 2009.
Well, at least the White House is happy. Fannie and Freddie turned over $66.4 billion to the government at the end of June, money that will help reduce the deficit.
The Federal Reserve will go ahead with proposed rule changes related to mortgage servicing rights, but with what it calls a lengthy transition period.
A high percentage of FHA-insured mortgage loans were deemed unacceptable after a post-endorsement review performed by the FHA revealed material defects that apparently went undetected at the time the loans were approved, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a recent report by HUDs Office of Lender Activities and Program Compliance, 44 percent of 6,251 single-family mortgage loans that underwent post-endorsement loan reviews in the first quarter of 2013 were found initially unacceptable. Under the FHAs three-tier rating system, loans are rated as conforming, deficient or unacceptable. The review found...
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors unanimously issued a revised Basel III final rule this week that abandons the proposed changes to the risk-weighting of residential mortgages, but presses ahead with the proposed new treatment of mortgage servicing rights. In backing off the proposed changes for residential mortgages, Fed officials cited community bank concerns about the complexity of calculating loan-to-value ratios under the proposed regime. They also emphasized concerns about the unknown interaction the proposed changes would have with other mortgage-related rulemakings confronting the industry, most notably the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus qualified mortgage standard as well as the qualified residential mortgage definition, which is still in development by federal regulators. In light of new regulations designed to improve the quality of mortgage underwriting as well as continued uncertainty regarding the aggregate impact of pending mortgage-related rulemakings, the draft final rule does not include...
On Tuesday the Fed will hold an open meeting to discuss final rule-making tied to the Basel III accords, which affects the value of mortgage servicing rights.