The member advance business – the core product line for the Federal Home Loan Banks – continued to decline at the end of 2010, hitting a nine-year low. The 12 FHLBanks reported a total of $478.6 billion in outstanding advances at the end of last year, down 24.2 percent from the end of 2009. It was the lowest volume of... [Includes two data charts]

Newly issued guidance from the Federal Housing Finance Agency requires Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks to report any fraudulent financial instruments that they purchased or sold. but the guidance also requires Fannie and Freddie to take the extra step of submitting monthly fraud reports to...

The outgoing president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City turned some heads this week when he declared that the nation’s largest banks and recipients of federal bailout funds should be re-branded as government-sponsored enterprises and their lending activities should be curtailed accordingly. Thomas Hoenig reportedly told...

A recent survey by the New York-based Reputation Institute found that Freddie Mac is the least reputable company to do business with, while fellow GSE Fannie Mae was named the third least reputable company, but an expert advised that it’s not the end of the world for publicity-challenged companies. The private consulting firm conducted...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency last week approved some updates to Fannie Mae’s corporate performance goals which the company will use to determine executive compensation. Fannie’s newly approved 2011 corporate goals will be the barometer by which performance will be measured for the purposes of the first installment of the...

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle is making progress in light of its ongoing struggles in the mortgage market but significant challenges remain, according to a recent ratings announcement by Fitch Ratings. Last week, Fitch announced it has assigned long-term and short-term Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) to the...

Implementing a broad range of procedural changes and picking through two years’ worth of foreclosure activity are expected to impose a significant expense on mortgage servicers that agreed to consent orders with federal regulators this week, but industry experts say the threat of penalties and remedial costs appears...[Includes one graph]

The current method of paying servicers could stand to be improved, but regulators and secondary market investors need to bear in mind that change would have ripple effects throughout the industry, according to a new analysis by Mortgage Industry Advisory Corp., a consulting firm based in New York. “Changing the servicing fee from its current form may...

Two of the nation’s top mortgage lenders have announced some hefty job cuts as the industry appears headed into a steep drop in new originations in 2011. Bank of America announced late this week that it is adjusting...[Includes one data chart]

Generation “Y” has a huge mortgage appetite, and despite the housing market crash in 2008 and the difficulty of getting a home loan, many of its members think they will become homeowners – and sooner rather than later, according to a recent study conducted by Lachman Associates. “These are happy optimists – which is...