However, on Wednesday, five members of the Senate Banking Committee wrote to FHFA Director Mel Watt, warning him against taking any administrative action that might alter the dividend payment.
Despite the huge losses posted by PHH, James Egan, chairman of the board, said Messina “has led PHH with vision, decisiveness and integrity through one of the most turbulent periods in the mortgage industry in decades...”
The GSEs have developed proposals to more closely align their mortgage insurance master policies with their reps-and-warranties policies, which will be reviewed by the FHFA this year.
But the issue is hardly settled. Ron Haynie, senior vice president of mortgage policy at the ICBA, told Inside Mortgage Finance that he expects a change in the dividend payment this year.
As the clock ticks down on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac running out of a capital buffer in early 2018, there is a growing belief in the mortgage industry that the Federal Housing Finance Agency will move to change dividends payments by the two from a quarterly to an annual basis. If the FHFA pulls the trigger, it would allow the government-sponsored enterprises to sit on a pile of cash before upstreaming it to Treasury – money that would give them a buffer if rates turn the wrong way and a hedging loss ensues in a given quarter. Ron Haynie, senior vice president of mortgage policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America, told...
Since 2012 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have provided the government with a hefty amount of funds thanks to the Treasury sweep of GSE profits, which could be a perverse disincentive to move forward on housing finance reform. The two government-sponsored enterprises expected to pass along a combined $9.97 billion during the first quarter of 2017, the net profits they earned in the fourth quarter that exceeded the $600 million cap on retained capital. That brings...
With House Republicans set to resume work on legislation to overhaul provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act, mortgage lenders testified at a hearing this week calling for changes to standards for qualified mortgages. “As a result of some of the constraints in the QM definition, many borrowers who should qualify for a QM are unable to access safe, sustainable and affordable mortgage credit,” said David Motley, president of Colonial Companies and chairman-elect of the Mortgage Bankers Association. He made the comments at a hearing by the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit. The MBA urged...
A former Fannie executive said it was always his belief the GSE charter allowed for multifamily financing but the idea was to fund “vertical” homes and not “horizontal.”
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