One GOP staffer told Inside Mortgage Finance the combination of strong industry support for Calabria, plus the nominee’s “bravura performance” at his confirmation hearing, probably sealed the deal on a quick trip.
This week, Mark Calabria moved a step closer to heading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. His nomination as the agency’s director was approved by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on a party-line vote of 13-12.
Do you trust your mortgage lender? This turns out to be a crucial question when it comes to persuading borrowers to refinance their homes, according to a paper by researchers at the Columbia Business School. The answer they got: Not so much.
Even though Mark Calabria backtracked on a decade of controversial comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at his confirmation hearing last week, his nomination to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency came out of the Senate Banking Committee with a 13 to 12, strictly party-line vote.
In his semi-annual testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally put a number to his talk of “normalizing” the central bank’s balance sheet. He described a balance of $1 trillion as “a reasonable starting point, an estimate of where we might end up.”
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Investment Company Institute, in a joint letter, urged the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department to clarify certain diversification requirements under the single security initiative.
“HARP is dead, long live High LTV Refinance programs!” That’s the title of a recent report by structured finance analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch on the impact HARP’s replacements will have on the government-sponsored enterprises’ credit-risk transfer programs.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Thursday morning, Mark Calabria, President Trump’s nominee to take over the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said the rumors were true: He did, in fact, discuss plans to recapitalize the government-sponsored enterprises with administration officials.