- HUD’s Office of Policy Development & Research released its most recent issue of Cityscape, featuring research from a symposium about affordable housing and neighborhood qualities.
- The HOME Coalition released “Building HOME: The HOME Investment Partnerships Program’s Impact on America’s Families and Communities”, analyzing the program’s impact. The report analyzes the economic impact on leveraged investments, jobs supported, and local income generated.
- The FHFA released its Annual Housing Report for 2014 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Tag Archives: FHFA
Obama Administration on Frannie
Michael Stegman, a White House Senior Policy Advisor, offered up the Obama Administration’s “perspective on critical housing issues” recently. (1) I found the remarks on the future of Fannie and Freddie to be of particular interest:
Before discussing what we would like to see happen in this Congress on GSE reform, you should be aware that last week the Administration made clear its opposition to taking any action in support of what has become known as “recap and release.” We believe that recapitalizing the GSEs with taxpayer funds and administratively- or legislatively-releasing them from conservatorship with a business model that conflicts with their public mission— in essence turning back the clock to the run up to the crisis~ would be both bad policy and poor stewardship of the taxpayers’ interest; willfully recreating the very system that helped do this nation so much harm.
ln remarks I presented two weeks ago at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference, I cautioned that no one should be misled by the increasingly noisy chorus of the advocates of recap and release, many of whom have placed big bets against reform so they can make a‘profit, and are doing everything they can to make sure that those bets pay off.
Nor, I said, should their promise that recap and release would generate a pot of money for affordable housing be taken seriously.
Despite claims to the contrary, recapitalizing the GSEs would not itself provide any resources for affordable housing. Nor can a related — or even unrelated — sale of Treasury’s investment in the GSEs provide any resources for affordable housing. The proceeds of the sale of any GSE obligations acquired by Treasury must by law be “dedicated for the sole purpose of deficit reduction.”
Rather than freeing recapitalized GSEs from conservatorship with their flawed charters intact, we should pursue more comprehensive approaches to reform such as those that members of Congress have introduced over the past two years including mutualizing Fannie and Freddie, or build upon bipartisan agreements on the features of a future secondary market system that were hammered out in the Senate Banking Committee last year:
Preservation of the TBA market; an explicit, paid for government guarantee of catastrophic losses for investors in qualifying MBS; maintaining a clear separation of the primary and secondary markets; ensuring the flow of mortgage credit in both good times and bad; separating the securitization plumbing from private credit risk taking; ensuring that community lenders have the same access to the secondary market as big banks; and making the benefits of government guaranteed MBS available to all households — both those who choose to rent and those with the ability and desire to own.
Members in Congress also reached bipartisan consensus on a transparent way to serve those the private market cannot serve without subsidy, through an annual 10 basis point assessment on the outstanding balance of government-guaranteed MES—which once fully implemented, would generate about 15 times more resources a year for affordable housing than FHFA is expected to raise through the GSEs’ current affordable housing levy–though we were pleased to see the Director begin collections on the affordability fee and look forward to effectively implementing the dollars through the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund that should become available for the first time in the early months of 2016.
But there is much more work to be done on ensuring a level playing field in the new system, including a robust role for community banks and credit unions who know how best to serve their customers, and ensuring that all communities are served fairly, which can be most effectively achieved through a statutory duty to serve. Regrettably, the Committee could not agree upon such a provision during last year’s negotiations, and we will continue to fight for it. (3-4)
Much of these remarks are eminently reasonable but I have to say that the Obama Administration has not deployed much political capital on reforming the housing finance system. This has left the whole system in limbo and the longer it stays in limbo, the more likely it is that special interests will make inroads into the reform of the system, inroads that will not be in the public interest.
While the likelihood of reform coming out of the current Congress is incredibly small, the Administration should take all of the administrative steps it can to sketch out an outline of a housing finance system that can work for a broad range of borrowers through the credit cycle without putting excessive risk on taxpayers.
The Administration has taken some steps in the right direction, like off-loadling some risk from Fannie and Freddie to private investors. But there is a lot more work to be done if we are to have a system that provides the optimal amount of credit through the 21st century.
Friday’s Government Reports Roundup
- The FHFA releases it 2015-2017 Housing Goals for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
- The US Department of Agriculture released its 20th Annual Food Security Report. The reports shows that 1 in 7 people live in food insecure households, but there has been a slight decline over the past few years.
Better to Be a Banker or a Non-Banker?
The Community Home Lenders Association (CHLA) has prepared an interesting chart, Comparison of Consumer and Financial Regulation of Non-bank Mortgage Lenders vs. Banks. The CHLA is a trade association that represents non-bank lenders, so the chart has to be read in that context. The side-by side-chart compares the regulation of non-banks to banks under a variety of statutes and regulations. By way of example, the chart leads off with the following (click on the chart to see it better):
The chart emphasizes all the ways that non-banks are regulated where banks are exempt as well as all of the ways that they are regulated in the identical manner. Given that this is an advocacy document, it only mentions in passing the ways that banks are governed by various little things like “generic bank capital standards” and safety and soundness regulators. That being said, it is still good to look through the chart to see how non-bank regulation has been increasing since the passage of Dodd-Frank.
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is seeking public comment on its revised system of records for the National Mortgage Database Project. The FHFA collects information on all outstanding U.S. mortgages in keeping with its mandate to ensure the creditworthiness of borrowers. Mortgages remain in the NMDB until they terminate through prepayment (including refinancing), foreclosure or maturity. Information from credit repository files on each borrower associated with the mortgages in the NMDB will be collected from one year prior to origination to one year after termination of the mortgage.
Friday’s Government Reports
- The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has reported an uptick in mortgage rates from June to July 2015. This is according to the Monthly Interest Rate Survey (MIRS), which measures several indices of new mortgage contracts to arrive at a national average. July’s average was 4.02% up 17 basis points from June’s 3.8%.
- The FHFA has also released its second quarter Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) refinance results. According to the report refinances remained unchanged between the first and second quarters of 2015, 31,561 borrowers refinanced with HARP funds, which represented 5% of all U.S. refinances. HARP was established in 2009 in order to assist homeowners unable to refinance because of a decline in their home value. As of March the FHFA estimated that there were over 500,000 borrowers eligible for the HARP program.
- Also according to the FHFA house prices rose 1.2% from the first to the second quarter (Q2) of 2015 and are up more that 5% over Q2 201. This is according FHFA’s House Price Index (HPI) which has been up for the last 16 consecutive quarters.
Credit Risk Transfer Deals
The Federal Housing Finance Agency released an Overview of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Credit Risk Transfer Transactions. It opens,
In 2012, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) initiated a strategic plan to develop a program of credit risk transfer intended to reduce Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s (the Enterprises’) overall risk and, therefore, the risk they pose to taxpayers. In just three years, the Enterprises have made significant progress in developing a market for credit risk transfer securities, evidenced by the fact that they have already transferred significant credit risk on loans with over $667 billion of unpaid principal balance (UPB).
Credit risk transfer is now a regular part of the Enterprises’ business. The Enterprises are currently transferring a significant amount of the credit risk on almost 90% of the loans that account for the vast majority of their underlying credit risk. These loans constitute about half of all Enterprise loan acquisitions. Going forward, FHFA will continue to encourage the Enterprises to engage in large volumes of meaningful credit risk transfer through specific goals in the annual conservatorship scorecard and by working closely with Enterprise staff to develop and evaluate credit risk transfer structures. (2)
This is indeed good news for taxpayers and should reduce their exposure to future losses at Fannie and Freddie. There is still a lot of work to do, though, to get that risk level as low as possible. The report notes that these transactions have not yet been done for adjustable-rate mortgages or 15 year mortgages. Most importantly, the report cautions that
Because the programs have not been implemented through an entire housing price cycle, it is too soon to say whether the credit risk transfer transactions currently ongoing will make economic sense in all stages of the cycle. Specifically, we cannot know the extent to which investors will continue to participate through a housing downturn. Additionally, the investor base and pricing for these transactions could be affected by a higher interest rate environment in which other fixed-income securities may be more attractive alternatives. (22)
Taxpayers are exposed to many heightened risks during Fannie and Freddie’s conservatorship, such as operational risk. These risk transfer transactions are thus particularly important while the two companies linger on in that state.
