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.
Ocwen Loan Servicing on Wednesday filed an amended complaint in its lawsuit againstFidelity National Information Services. The complaint, filed in California’s Superior Court in Sacramento, dramatically escalates accusations of misconduct Ocwen first leveled against FIS in a 2017 lawsuit.
In a remarkable political balancing act during his confirmation hearing Thursday morning, Mark Calabria, President Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency, told Senate Banking Committee members they need not worry about his history of controversial and inflammatory remarks on FHFA and the government-sponsored enterprises.