Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and Cory Booker — Democrats jockeying to be the 2020 presidential candidate — lay out comprehensive plans to reform the nation’s affordable-housing system.
Reverse mortgage lender Live Well Financial is headed into liquidation, causing financial damage along the way to warehouse providers Flagstar Bank and Customers Bank. What killed the company? Answer: IO securities that were decimated by falling interest rates.
Former Fannie Mae CFO Tim Howard says there is no economic reason the GSEs should hold capital comparable to large commercial banks. “Fannie and Freddie are not multi-product and multinational lenders. They are mono-line insurance companies, limited to a single asset type – residential mortgages – whose historical credit loss performance has been dramatically better than banks.”
The GSE is trying to gather all the stakeholders of the affordable housing “ecosystem,” including lenders, counselors, local housing agencies, and real estate professionals, under a single umbrella.
Freddie announces a $1.3 billion Seasoned Loans Structured Transaction; Fannie prices a $1 billion REMIC deal; Freddie launches a new product to address aging housing supply; CEO Layton’s last week at Freddie.
The GSEs continue to offload delinquent loans in their mortgage portfolios, bringing the tally of loans sold since 2014 to 117,466 with an unpaid balance of more than $22 billion. Page 9.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin itemized some of the other SIFI-like characteristics of Fannie and Freddie: “They have enormous leverage. I have no idea what the right number is, but it’s beyond any reasonable measure of leverage. And they’re heavily interconnected.”