The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week announced that acting Director Joseph Otting authorized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to release payments to both the National Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund.
Although Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government in the fall of 2008, the two have been wildly profitable – with a few bumps along the way – since 2012.
A panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling earlier this month, said a reseller of mortgages can demand that an originator repurchase defective loans, even though the contract between the two companies did not specify a timeframe within which the originator had to cure any defects. The decision reversed a lower court’s ruling.
In a class action lawsuit filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a group of institutional investors allege that several Fannie Mae- and Freddie Mac-approved dealers colluded in a systematic scheme to manipulate prices in the secondary market for agency debt.