Tag Archives: FHFA

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced on Friday proposed new minimum financial requirements for mortgage sellers and servicers to do business with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The proposed requirements include minimums for net worth, capital ratio, and liquidity criteria that must be met by servicers and sellers to do business with the GSEs.

U.S. Representative Ed Royce (R-California), a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee and a member of the Capital Markets and GSE Subcommittee and the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee, has introduced the Pay Back the Taxpayers Act of 2015, according to an announcement on Royce's website.

December's index, which saw about 215,000 new loans added to the pool of risk-rated mortgages, was up 0.4 percentage points from the average for the prior three months and 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier, AEI said. As ever, the largest portion of risk came from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which had a risk index of 24.33 percent, up 0.2 percentage points from the prior three-month average. Following that were the Veterans Affairs index, which was at 11.5 percent, and the Fannie/Freddie index, which was 6.2 percent, just above the 6 percent threshold AEI says is "indicative of conditions conducive to a stable market."

Federal Housing Finance Director (FHFA) Director Mel Watt, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, which he once sat on as a Democratic U.S. Representative for North Carolina, insisted that mortgage loans with a 3 percent down payment backed by GSEs are no more riskier than those with a loan-to-value (LTV) ratio of lower than 80 percent.

Government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac has announced that it will begin its second sale of “deeply delinquent” mortgage loans in three pools worth approximately $410 million. Delinquent loans left over from a wave of foreclosures following the housing bust have dogged Freddie Mac and its sister GSE, Fannie Mae. The conservator for both GSEs,

Monthly refinance numbers moved in fits and starts throughout 2014, bouncing between a low of 105,059 in March and October's year-to-date high—though the trend in the year's latter half was largely upward as mortgage rates fell to nearly 4.0 percent.

Among the goals in that category are instructions for the GSEs to finalize their rep and warranty frameworks (a process started late last year), encourage more participation from smaller lenders, and continue watching for other hurdles to credit access.

NAFCU's complaint stems from a provision of the proposed rule that would require FHLB members and applicants to keep 1 percent of assets in home mortgage loans. Current members would also be required to hold at least 10 percent of assets in residential mortgage loans on an ongoing basis as opposed to just at the time of application, as the current rule requires.

In a report released Monday morning, Fitch outlined five big events—all of which have taken place in the past few months—that, taken together, "could have a relatively meaningful impact on home buyer psychology, pent-up demand and housing trends in 2015 and beyond," the company says.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) may have to pay additional penalties to settle claims that it sold faulty U.S. mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the housing market crash, according to a report from Reuters.