November 21, 2017
Housing Problems and Federal Assistance
The Urban Institute’s G. Thomas Kingsley has posted a brief, Trends in Housing Problems and Federal Housing Assistance. It opens, In the 1930s, many American families lived in seriously deficient housing. To address that challenge, the federal government began building subsidized housing, … Continue reading
November 21, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 20, 2017
FHA Annual Check-up
The Department of Housing and Urban Development released its Annual Report to Congress Regarding the Financial Status of the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. The MMIF fund is the FHA’s main vehicle for insuring mortgages. As we saw last week, … Continue reading
November 20, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 16, 2017
Thank You, Director Cordray
Richard Cordray has announced that he will be stepping down as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has been a lightning rod for critics of the Bureau. Those of us who believe that predatory behavior was endemic in … Continue reading
November 16, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 15, 2017
The FHA’s Ailing Reverse Mortgage Program
The Fiscal Year 2017 Independent Actuarial Review of the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund: Cash Flow Net Present Value from Home Equity Conversion Mortgage Insurance in Force has been released. It has some bad news: FHA provides reverse mortgage insurance through the HECM … Continue reading
November 15, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 14, 2017
The Future of Public Housing
The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley has posted Lessons for the Future of Public Housing: Assessing the Early Implementation of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program. Housing policy analysts have bemoaned the chronic underfunding of public housing for decades … Continue reading
November 14, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 10, 2017
How Important Is Skin in The Game?
Haoyang Liu has posted a paper to SSRN that challenges the effectiveness of skin-in-the-game market discipline: Does Skin-in-the-Game Discipline Risk Management? Evidence from Mortgage Insurance. The abstract reads, Many mortgage reform proposals suggest replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) … Continue reading
November 10, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
November 9, 2017
Your Lender, The Federal Reserve Board
Laurie Goodman and Bing Bai at the Urban Institute have posted Normalizing the Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet The Impact on the Mortgage-Backed Securities Market. It is quite extraordinary to realize that the Federal Reserve owns nearly a third of outstanding residential … Continue reading
November 9, 2017 in Regulation | Permalink | No Comments
