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April's Sentiment Index reading of 95.9 was the second-highest since 2007, second only to January 2015. Curtin said despite the large decline in the index for May, consumers' attitudes toward personal finances and spending habits have stayed positive.

Los Angeles sued Bank of America, one of the nation's largest lenders and servicers of residential mortgages, in December 2013. The lawsuit accused the bank of predatory lending in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, saying the terms of mortgage loans offered to minorities were less favorable than those offered to Whites.

Two additional requirements imposed by the Bailout Prevention Act on the Fed's broad-based lending programs are, according to Bernanke: first, requiring a firm's solvency to be certified by the Fed and the supervisors of the firm before receiving any loans; and second, requiring emergency loan interest rates to be at least 5 percentage points higher than the Treasury Department's rate.

Counsel's Corner is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with default servicing attorneys around the country about the most pressing issues facing the default servicing industry. This installment features Brian Liebo of Minneapolis-based Usset, Weingarden & Liebo.

SW Sponsor, LLC, was the winning bidder for Pool No.1 , which included 710 loans with an aggregate UPB of $173.8 million; the winning bidder for Pool No. 2, which included 2,358 loans with an aggregate UPB of $587.9 million, was Neuberger Berman Fixed Income Funds’ affiliate PRMF Acquisition LLC.

According to the FHFA, the initial goal was to assist in building a Common Securitization Platform (CSP) and support the statutory obligation to ensure the liquidity of the nation’s housing finance markets issued by the FHFA. Taxpayers would also not have to suffer the cost of subsidizing Freddie Mac’s securitization of single-family mortgage loans with the Single Security.

Today, Freddie Mac receives about one tenth of the amount of calls it was receiving during the immediate aftermath of the housing crash (about 40,000 per month, or 1,300 per day), but many homeowners facing financial setbacks are still calling Freddie Mac hoping the GSE will have a solution for them, whether it allows them to keep their home or is of the non-home retention variety.

Visio found that 63 percent more investors are considering purchasing properties over $200,000, while sub-$40,000 deal interest has decreased, compared with last year’s report. Investors are also seeking to enhance their investment return strategy by fixing and flipping homes and building their rental portfolios.

The number of individuals who had a foreclosure notation added to their credit reports in Q1 was 112,000, the lowest total since 1999, while the number of consumers who had bankruptcies added to their credit reports dropped by 4 percent from Q4 to Q1 down to the lowest point since 2006.

One of the witnesses at the hearing, Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law Paul G. Mahoney, said a consequence of Dodd-Frank will be fewer and larger banks in the United States, because Dodd-Frank has layered on "costly new regulations that the large banks can afford but smaller ones cannot."