As usual, the Trump administration’s proposed annual budget appears to be dead on arrival. It simply steps on too many legislative toes. Among the issues the budget will face is how Congress reacts to its treatment of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
A class action lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late last month, alleges that several of the dominant dealers in the debt instruments of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac colluded in a systematic price-fixing scheme between at least January 1, 2009, and April 27, 2014.
There are some worrying trends buried in the tables of Freddie Mac’s quarterly refinance statistics for 2018. This, of course, is just a small slice of the economic pie, but the data have all the hallmarks of another housing bubble.
In early March, just before the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association voted in favor of allowing the uniform mortgage-backed security for delivery in the to-be-announced market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hosted a conference.
Freddie Mac will restructure all future credit-risk transfer offerings through its flagship Structured Agency Credit Risk program as real estate mortgage investment conduits, Kevin Palmer, senior vice president for single-family credit risk transfer, said.
Mortgage sellers repurchased just $833.7 mil-lion of single-family loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities last year, according to a new Inside the GSEs analysis. [Includes one data chart.]
Late last month, Bloomberg reported that Kushner Cos., the real estate investment firm owned by the family of President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, was in negotiations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for as much a $1.15 billion in loans. Some facts, though, make it difficult to know if the story is accurate.
The Current Expected Credit Losses standard, a new accounting protocol expected to go into effect in 2020, could have an outsized impact on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, a prominent Republican on the House Financial Services Committee.
Freddie Mac increased its production of single-family mortgage-backed securities at a time when its two secondary market competitors saw significant declines in volume. [Includes two data charts.]
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