Pulte said that any exit by the GSEs from conservatorship “must be carefully planned to ensure the safety and soundness of the housing market without putting upward pressures on mortgage rates.”

For many years, when households couldn’t afford to pay all their bills, they prioritized their auto loan payments. But as home prices have soared, mortgage payments have taken precedence.

Some economists believe eliminating all GSE MBS would lower rates on Treasury securities and reduce the government’s borrowing costs.

Although traditional underwriting can adequately predict and price for the risk of default on individual mortgages, large pools are subject to risks from unobserved correlations between those loans.

During a confirmation hearing last week, Trump’s nominee to head FHFA was noncommittal in response to questions about GSE reform, a hint that the administration has other priorities.

The government watchdog said federal agencies associated with housing finance have met three of five critical criteria for mitigating the risk they pose to taxpayers.

The annual increase in conforming loan limits creates a natural experiment for economists to examine how competition from nonbanks influences the operations of depositories.

To this point, identifying loans for voluntary partial cancellation has been done manually.

For the seventh quarter in a row, the Des Moines bank was the most profitable.

HUD has no oversight authority over the GSEs, but it looks as though the HUD secretary will have a seat at the restructuring table.