The Federal Housing Finance Agency has hired Washington-based Spencer Stuart to help find a chief executive to man the helm of the “common securitization platform” project. One former Fannie Mae official familiar with the effort told Inside The GSEs that the project has taken on a more “serious” urgency at the agency. “I’m not sure of the timeline, but it’s moving along.” One mortgage official who was approached about the job – but who made it clear he is not interested – said that the CEO FHFA hires “will need to be creative, revolutionary and good at many things.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is ready, willing and able to use its big stick as regulator of the GSEs to play hardball against municipalities that move forward with proposed efforts to seize underwater mortgages via local government eminent domain powers, say industry observers. One year ago nearly to the day after the FHFA warned “action might be necessary” to protect the GSEs, the Finance Agency released a legal memorandum outlining a number of steps it could take in response to an eminent domain action to restructure mortgages. The FHFA reiterated its “significant concerns” as conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as regulator of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks, that widespread seizures of the loans and their subsequent refinancing “presents a clear threat to the safety and sound operations of the GSEs.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency may pursue a fraud lawsuit against Ally Financial despite the bankruptcy status of Ally’s Residential Capital mortgage unit, a Manhattan federal judge ruled this week. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote denied Ally’s request to stay the FHFA’s litigation, a typical motion by bankrupt debtors to defer litigation as they seek to reorganize. In 2011, the FHFA filed 18 lawsuits alleging that Ally and other large financial institutions misrepresented the quality of non-agency mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the 2008 financial crisis.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at the direction of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, are developing a standardized dataset to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s yet-to-be finalized consolidated closure disclosure forms, the GSEs recently announced. The GSEs’ new Uniform Closing Dataset is a component of the FHFA-mandated Uniform Mortgage Data Program, which is designed to standardize the way loan data is defined, captured and delivered. “The UMDP is a multifaceted, ongoing program in which the GSEs develop and implement mortgage data standards for the single-family loans we purchase and/or securitize,” Freddie said. “Capturing consistent and accurate data is essential to our ability to effectively assess risk on the mortgages we purchase and will create efficiencies for all industry participants.” In conjunction with the uniform appraisal data standards, Freddie said it has worked with Fannie on a joint appraisal data delivery portal, the Uniform Collateral Data Portal, for the electronic capture of appraisal data.
The voluntary attrition rate of experienced and knowledgeable staffers within Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s capital markets businesses remains a concern, but for the time being the problem “appears to have been mitigated,” according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s official watchdog. Although employee turnover at both GSEs has been an issue that accelerated following the companies’ move into government conservatorship in 2008, the FHFA’s Office of Inspector General zeroed in on staffing at Fannie’s Capital Markets Group and Freddie’s Investments & Capital Markets Division “because of their portfolios’ size, complexity and susceptibility to sustaining significant losses.”
The U.S. Treasury will receive a massive cash payment of $14.6 billion by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac next month following robust second-quarter earnings, leaving the two GSEs potentially within a quarter or two of reaching the point where their dividend payments equal the massive bailout provided to them by taxpayers. The period ending June 30, 2013, saw Fannie reporting $10.1 billion in net income, the company’s sixth consecutive quarterly profit, while Freddie posted $5.0 billion in net income. The second quarter was Freddie’s seventh straight profitable quarter and its second largest in company history. Under the revised conservatorship agreement rolled out a year ago by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury Department, any GSE net worth exceeding $3.0 billion is impounded by the government.
Residential mortgage production remained fairly strong in the second quarter thanks to an increase in retail-channel originations, which reached an all-time high of 64.6 percent in market share, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Finance. The surge in retail production appears largely tied to ongoing strength in refinance activity. But lenders that are turning their attention to the purchase-mortgage market should consider that correspondents (34.8 percent) and brokers (22.0 percent) had higher concentrations of purchase loans than retail producers (19.3 percent) during the second quarter, based on Fannie/Freddie activity. Wells Fargo, as usual, continued...[Includes five data charts]
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