Although the common stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been deemed near worthless by stock analysts (and others), the share price of the two has been on a tear of late thanks to comments made two weeks ago by investment banker Steven Mnuchin, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Treasury Department. As Inside The GSEs went to press this week, Fannie common was trading at just $4.00 a share, Freddie at $3.90. And while that might not seem like much, it represents a stunning 166 percent gain since right before the November election. Mnuchin set the stocks in orbit when he said during a cable TV interview that resolving...

If lenders evaluated borrowers more “holistically” and put less emphasis on credit scores, the share of minorities receiving purchase mortgages could increase significantly, according to analysts at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. Laurie Goodman, director of the HFPC, and Alanna McCargo, the co-director, noted that some 70.0 percent of purchase mortgages originated in 2015 went to white borrowers. They suggested that the disparate impact of tight credit is ...

The National Fair Housing Alliance filed a housing discrimination lawsuit against Fannie Mae for allegedly not properly maintaining real estate-owned properties in 38 metropolitan areas with high proportions of African-Americans and Latinos.The lawsuit was filed this week in the federal district court in San Francisco. Fannie denies the allegations. According to the NFHA and 20 local fair housing groups across the country, Fannie purposely does not maintain its foreclosed properties in middle- and working-class minority neighborhoods to the same level of quality it does for foreclosures it owns in comparable white neighborhoods. Foreclosed properties in minority communities were littered with debris and trash, marked by graffiti...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently requested to withdraw from the Ireland and Luxembourg markets, citing increased regulation that’s almost impossible for certain companies to comply with. Freddie asked that its debt and mortgage securities and Structured Agency Credit Risk debt notes be delisted from those two markets in the European Union on Nov. 30.  …

Of the three reverse mortgage firms, American Advisors Group was fined the most: $400,000...

Have any of the GSE stock speculators that bought on the cheap cashed out of their gains?

The one weak spot in the mortgage market during the third quarter was in traditional jumbo originations, a trend that was reinforced by a significant increase in production of agency mortgages in high-cost markets that exceeded $417,000. An estimated $101.0 billion of non-agency jumbo home loans were originated during the third quarter, down 1.9 percent from the previous quarter. At the same time, production of conforming-jumbo mortgages – loans greater than $417,000 that were securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae – jumped 27.7 percent from the second to the third quarter. Some of the disparity is...[Includes three data tables]

Despite higher interest rates, publicly traded mortgage stocks have been rising since the election, but market watchers are cautious that recent gains could evaporate quickly. “Two things are going on here,” said Henry Coffey, an equities analyst at Wedbush Securities. “We’ve had a massive market rally, especially in financial stocks. But the general consensus is that the new administration is going to be less punitive than the current one.” Coffey added...[Includes one data table]

During his successful campaign for the White House, then-candidate Donald Trump won applause and support from the business community for his promise to substantially cut back on federal regulations. Many in the mortgage lending community had hopes the plan would include some relief from the mortgage regulations issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Among other things, Trump said he would issue a temporary moratorium on “new agency regulations that are not compelled by Congress or public safety [and] cancel immediately all illegal and overreaching executive orders.” Richard Horn, who worked on the CFPB’s integrated-disclosure rulemaking known as TRID, said...

Fannie Mae has not treated its foreclosed properties in African-American and Latino communities the same as those in predominately white neighborhoods, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week by the National Fair Housing Alliance. The NFHA, along with 20 fair housing and civil rights groups, said its investigation found signs of racial discrimination when it comes to the upkeep and marketing of Fannie’s real estate-owned properties in 38 metropolitan areas across the country. These properties in minority neighborhoods were blighted...