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Rieke's 23-year career in the mortgage lending arena includes managing several highly profitable wholesale lending operations. In his new role at Mid America, Rieke will focus on the TPO lending sector.

March's already low reported job gains total of 126,000 was revised even further lower in April's report, down to 85,000. Combined with February's job gains revision from 264,000 to 266,000 in April, employment gains in February and March combined were 39,000 lower than originally reported. Job gains have averaged 191,000 per month over the past three months.

Fannie Mae's comprehensive income for Q1 was reported at $1.8 billion, up from $1.3 billion in Q4. The Enterprise reported a net worth of $3.6 billion as of the end of Q1, which will result in a payment of $1.8 billion to the Department of Treasury in June per the terms of a 2012 amendment to the 2008 bailout agreement. Following the forthcoming June payment, Fannie Mae will have paid $138.2 billion in dividends to Treasury – about $22.1 billion more than the $116.1 billion bailout Fannie Mae received from taxpayers in 2008 to continue operations.

Former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair Sheila Bair has been announced as the new president of Washington College, a private liberal arts school in Maryland, according to an announcement from Washington College. Bair will be the 28th president overall and first female president of historic Washington College, which was founded in 1782.

In a report filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday, NMS Monitor Joseph A. Smith, Jr., reported the results of the retesting for Q1 2014 and also outlined several actions Ocwen has taken to improve its internal review group (IRG), which Smith has been investigating since May 2014.

Housing and economic activity has returned to or exceeded normal levels in 68 of about 360 metropolitan areas in the country (about 19 percent) as of the end of Q1 2015, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/First American Leading Markets Index (LMI) released Wednesday. The 68 markets represent a year-over-year increase of seven markets, according to NAHB.

Royce said in a statement on his website that it is "unconscionable" that Freddie Mac would elevate the pay of its CEO to that level while taxpayers are still on the hook. The fact that the GSEs are still under conservatorship of the FHFA, where they have been since September 2008, is still a contentious one among politicians and stakeholders in the housing market.

Derivative losses were largely responsible for dropping Freddie Mac's net income by nearly $2 billion from Q3 to Q4 down to $227 million, but the GSE responded by nearly doubling that net income total in Q1 to $524 million. It marked the 14th consecutive quarter of profitability for Freddie Mac. In Q1, derivative losses declined to $2.4 billion, down from $3.4 billion the previous quarter.

Fitch Ratings affirmed that while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac maintained a "Stable Rating Outlook" in April due to direct financial support from the U.S. government, the ratings company said it expected the controversial FHFA's conservatorship of the two Enterprises would continue indefinitely.

Both the total bankruptcy filings for April and that average filings per day declined from March in the same number of filing days, continuing a trend that has been ongoing since the height of the financial crisis in 2010, according to April 2015 AACER bankruptcy data reported by Epiq Systems. In April, there were 77,884 total bankruptcy filings, down from March's total of 81,622 in the same number of filing days (22) during the month. April totaled 3,540 filings per day, compared with 3,712 in March.