Fannie Mae has announced the winning bids in its first-ever bulk sale of non-performing loans, which were auctioned off in two pools in collaboration with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and The Williams Capital Group. The transactions, which totaled approximately 3,000 deeply delinquent residential single-family mortgage loans with about $762 million in unpaid principal balance, are expected to close in mid-June.
SW Sponsor was the winning bidder for Pool Number 1, which included 710 loans with an aggregate UPB of $173 million. The winning bidder for Pool Number 2, which included more than 2,300 loans with an aggregate UPB of $588 million, was PRMF Acquisition. The average loan size for the two pools was $248,000 and the average delinquency of the loans was about five years, with an average broker price opinion loan-to-value ratio of 123 percent.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has voiced his displeasure with the provisions of a bi-partisan bill introduced in the Senate earlier this week that would limit the Fed's lending authority and end too big to fail. On his Brookings Institution blog on Friday, Bernanke, who was chairman of the central bank from 2006 to 2014, said that limiting the Fed's lending power during economic downturns as called for by the Bailout Prevention Act introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren and David Vitter "would be a mistake, one that would imprudently limit the Fed's ability to protect the economy in a financial panic."