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A hugely profitable year in 2013 for both Fannie Mae ($84 billion) and Freddie Mac ($49 billion) shifted widespread speculation from winding down the two GSEs to instead ending FHFA's conservatorship of the two Enterprises, which began in September 2008 after the two received a combined $188 billion from Treasury in bailout funds.

Distressed and at-risk Montana homeowners spoke out against the two bills in the state's House Business and Labor Committee on Thursday, claiming that their respective mortgagees had misled them verbally with regards to loss mitigation practices. The borrowers said they would have had no legal claim against those mortgagees if these bills had been in enacted before they filed their respective lawsuits against their lenders.

Despite both states having high numbers of completed foreclosures for the previous 12 months, other foreclosure-related statistics between the two states do not correlate. Florida's foreclosure inventory rate of 3.5 percent for January (third among states behind New Jersey and New York) was more than double the national average for the month (1.4 percent), whereas Michigan's foreclosure inventor was less than half that number (0.6 percent).

Recent actions by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) indicate that the Agency is placing an increased emphasis on the clearing out of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's seriously delinquent loan portfolios and steering more borrowers toward foreclosure prevention and loss mitigation actions, using foreclosure only as an absolute last resort.

Fitzpatrick noted Tuesday that each of the individual bills included in his legislation, the “Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burden Act,” had bipartisan support when they either passed the full House or his committee. But when packaged together, they have drawn the ire of more liberal Democrats.

The review was a test of the strength of the capital planning process of the financial institutions, as well to determine if the projected capital ratios of the firms could withstand a hypothetical scenario of severe economic stress as well. The Fed approved the capital plans of 28 of the institutions tested.

The practice of purchasing bank-owned properties in bulk quantities has become popular among investors in recent years, particularly at the height of the foreclosure wave in 2010 and 2011, because the properties can be bought at a fraction of the market value and then flipped for a profit.

The Federal Reserve has instructed Bank of America to revise its capital plan by September 30 to address weaknesses in the bank's capital planning process, according a press release on Wednesday. Bank of America stated in a press release on Wednesday that the company's Board of Directors authorized a $4 billion common stock repurchase program and that the Fed had completed its 2015 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review and informed the Charlotte, North Carolina-based megabank that the Fed did not object to the bank's capital plan for the period of Q2 2015 through Q2 2016. Under that plan, the common stock dividend rate would be maintained at 5 cents per share per quarter.

Freddie Mac Deputy Chief Economist Len Kiefer, who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Five Star Government Forum in Washington, D.C., on March 18, predicted in Freddie Mac's March 2015 Economic and Housing Market Outlook that the coming year would be the best for housing since 2007, immediately prior to the crash.

Freddie Mac sued Deloitte for $1.3 billion in a Florida court in September 2014 with regards to fraudulent mortgage loans the GSE purchased from Taylor Bean & Whitaker, according to reports. Freddie Mac says it would not have purchased those mortgage loans from Taylor Bean if Deloitte, which audited Freddie Mac from 2002 to 2009, had paid attention to red flags which indicated fraud.