Mortgage topics don’t always make the President’s State of the Union speech, but President Obama Tuesday night may touch on the issue of credit availability and whether the government has “gone too far.”
The cost of mortgage compliance was a topic making the rounds at the recent ABS Vegas show in Nevada. Attendees, of course, wanted to know who might pay for all the new added costs.
“It’s nearly impossible to get the information to the right person to vote on it,” said Bill Moliski, a managing director at SG Capital and former managing director at Redwood Trust.
The consensus among speakers at the ABS Vegas conference this week appeared to be that the MBS market is unlikely to change significantly this year. “The status quo is comfortable,” said Larry White, an economics professor at New York University’s business school. Issuers of non-agency MBS are working on reducing the government-sponsored enterprises’ dominance of the secondary market for mortgages, but the chicken-and-egg problem persists. New non-agency issuance has ground to a standstill, and Congress has been slow to move housing-finance reform legislation. In the meantime, industry observers expect...
A Manhattan federal judge last week ruled that Bank of New York Mellon may proceed with repurchase claims against a General Electric unit in connection with a $900 million non-agency MBS. BNYM, in its capacity as trustee for a pool of loans known as GE-WMC Mortgage Securities Trust 2006-1, filed suit against GE Mortgage Holdings and WMC Mortgage LLC in New York state court in 2012, where the defendants promptly moved the legal action to federal court to dismiss it. Following the court’s denial of the defendant’s motions to dismiss, GE Mortgage filed...
Who at the GSEs (or at the Federal Housing Finance Agency) was responsible for telling Fannie and Freddie to set aside so much money for loan losses and were those assumptions way off base?
The Treasury Department’s point man on housing declared this week that the government has no appetite to expand the Home Affordable Refinance Program, and he reiterated past Obama administration pledges to cashier Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Michael Stegman, counselor to the Treasury on housing finance policy, outlined for attendees of the ABS Vegas conference the administration’s housing goals, including its opposition to any HARP eligibility tweaking and its continued support for housing finance reform.
The Treasury Department’s surprise move during the summer of 2012 to revise the GSE Senior Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement was prompted by fears that Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s previous dividend payment obligations “would lead to the exhaustion of the Treasury [financial] commitment,” according to a senior Federal Housing Finance Agency official. …
Fannie Mae’s process for paying for servicer property inspections has “significant control deficiencies,” prompting the official watchdog of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to conclude that additional agency oversight is required, according to a new report. The audit by the FHFA’s Office of Inspector General estimated that some 9.5 percent of claims for pre-foreclosure property inspections in 2011 and 2012 resulted in $5 million in overpayments by Fannie. GSE guidelines require servicers to perform a monthly inspection on all delinquent properties.
FHFA Launches ‘Servicing Project’ to Watch Counterparty Risk. The Federal Housing Finance Agency has launched what industry officials have labeled “a servicing project” to keep an eye on all large servicing sales where the underlying collateral is guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sources briefed on the effort said the FHFAis now officially asking that the GSEs get agency approval for any sales of mortgage servicing rights where 25,000 or more in loans are being transferred. This translates into deal sizes of at least $5 billion.
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