Tag Archives: Treasury

Carney, Epstein, Macey & Reiss on GSE Litigation

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I was on an interesting panel today on the state of the Fannie/Freddie shareholder litigation. Judge Lamberth’s ruling in Perry Capital LLC v. Lew et al. was bad news for the plaintiffs in all of the shareholder suits. The panel was hosted by Michael Kim, CRT Capital Managing Director & Senior Research Analyst, and featured

  • John Carney – Wall Street Journal
  • Richard Epstein – NYU Law School
  • Jonathan Macey – Yale Law School
  • David Reiss – Brooklyn Law School

The agenda for the panel included

  • an overview of the litigation timeline for the cases in Iowa District Court, the Court of Federal Claims and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
  • a detailed analysis of Judge Lamberth’s Ruling and
  • a review of legal strategies and the outlook going forward

The more of these panels I am on, the more I am struck by the passionate intensity of those representing the shareholders. They are convinced that they are not only right, but also that the judiciary will see it their way. I lack this conviction.

It is not that I am so sure that the shareholders will ultimately lose (although that is a good possibility). Rather, it is that the facts and the law are extraordinarily complex in these cases. Because of this complexity, I find it hard to predict how the judges assigned to hear these cases will choose to frame them.

Judge Lamberth and other judges deciding cases arising from government action during the financial crisis often frame their decisions with a narrative of extraordinary government intervention during a period of great uncertainty. As a result, those judges have granted the government as much deference as they can.

Many of the shareholder advocates analogize from precedents drawn from more pedestrian situations and believe that courts will hew closely to them. I am quite skeptical of that approach. Judges lived through the crisis too and are all too aware of the precipice we were on. I think they will think twice before second guessing those who had to call the shots with such severely limited information, and did so while under unrelenting pressure to get it right when the stakes were so high.

FHA’s Financial Health Looking Up

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HUD has released the Annual Report to Congress Regarding the Financial Status of the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund Fiscal Year 2014. It appears that things are looking up for the FHA, particularly after last year’s mandatory appropriation from the Treasury, the first in the FHA’s 80 year history. For those of you who are not housing finance nerds, the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund (MMIF) is the financial backbone of the FHA’s single-family mortgage insurance program.  When it is in bad shape, the FHA is in bad shape.

As Secretary Castro notes in his forward to the report,

The value of the Fund has improved significantly, now standing at $4.8 billion. The increased economic value represents a capital reserve ratio of 0.41. This improvement shows tremendous progress, especially considering that the Fund had a negative value of $16.3 billion just two years ago. The two-year gain in Fund value is an impressive $21 billion. The performance of the portfolio has improved dramatically in a short period of time. Foreclosures are down 68 percent since the height of the crisis and recoveries to the Fund have improved 68 percent from their lowest level–saving billions of dollars. While FHA must still respond to challenges presented by legacy books and market volatility, the independent actuary’s report demonstrates that FHA is firmly on the right track and is projected to continue improving. (1)
The MMIF is supposed to have a capital reserve ratio of 2 percent, so the FHA is still quite a bit away from receiving a clean bill of health. But according to projections, it should achieve that level in 2016 and then continue to improve from there. (35, Ex. II-3)
While this is all pretty abstract, there are some pretty concrete aspects to the health of the MMIF. The size of FHA premiums, paid by homeowners borrowing FHA-insured mortgages, is set in the context of the health of the MMIF because the FHA is a self-funded government agency. So low reserves means that it is harder to cut premiums. Higher FHA premiums mean that  mortgages are more expensive for the low- and moderate income borrowers who make up a large part of the FHA’s book of business. So the health of the MMIF is an indicator of sorts of the health of the housing market overall.

Homeowners Lost in the Shuffle

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The Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) issued a report, Homeowners Can Get Lost in the Shuffle And Suffer Harm When Their Servicer Transfers Their Mortgage But Not the HAMP Application or Modification, that highlights some of the structural problems in the servicing industry. The report notes, for instance, that, “Homeowner calls to SIGTARP’s Hotline about difficulties experienced in HAMP as a result of mortgages being transferred from one servicer to another have persisted throughout the life of the program and have escalated in the last year.” (1) This is just the most recent reminder that servicing transfers continue to be a major source of trouble for homeowners.

SIGTARP concludes,

Given the scale of the reported problems related to transfers to new servicers, and the potentially serious harm to struggling homeowners who need relief from HAMP, Treasury must be aggressive and swift in sending the message to servicers that Treasury will not tolerate harm to homeowners in HAMP from servicing transfers. HAMP is five years old, and servicers have had ample time to understand the rules and to follow them. Treasury should no longer tolerate a failure to follow HAMP rules. Treasury should report on violations publicly, and permanently withhold incentive payments from servicers that do not comply with HAMP rules on transfers. (12)
The problems in the servicer industry are structural, but it is far from clear that there are sufficient structural changes in the works to deal with them. This sad state of affairs will last far into the future unless thoughtful solutions are designed and implemented in the present. So, while it is important that SIGTARP draws attention to this problem, it is more important for other regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency to take up the cause and start implementing far-reaching solutions.

Reiss in Newsday on Stimulus Program

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Newsday quoted me in State Faults Venture Capital Firm (registration required for full access).  The story reads in part,

New York State officials say Canrock Ventures, a venture capital firm in Brookville, failed to notify them of potential conflicts of interest when it invested taxpayer money in local technology startups.

An official with Empire State Development, the state’s primary business-aid agency, said under the terms of a written agreement with the state, Canrock should have convened a “valuation committee” to review its proposed investments of federal funds in four computer software startups.

The four businesses were co-founded by a Canrock partner, and the venture firm holds sizable stakes in them. The official requested anonymity.

Mark Fasciano, the Canrock partner, said yesterday that he disclosed all of Canrock’s holdings and his roles in the companies to the state at the start of the investment process.

*     *      *

Canrock’s 2013 contract with New York State, obtained by Newsday under the state Freedom of Information Law, stipulates that conflicts of interest are to be weighed by a valuation committee.

The Empire State Development official said the committee is composed of two state representatives and a Canrock representative, and can only been convened by the venture firm, not New York State.

“They [Canrock] have to disclose potential conflicts of interest to the valuation committee,” the official said last month. “They did not meet that requirement.”

*     *      *

Valuation committees were also included in the state contracts of six other venture firms investing Innovate NY money. None of the six called valuation committee meetings to handle conflicts of interest “because no conflicts had arisen,” an Empire State Development spokesman said.

Some experts questioned whether the valuation committees were effective.

David Reiss, a law professor and research director for Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship, said, “a self-reporting system,” such as the valuation committees, would only deter fraud if the probability of getting caught is high and the consequences are grave.

 “The likelihood of getting caught here sounds pretty low,” he said.

Are the FHA’s Losses Heartbreaking?

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The Inspector General of the Department of of Housing and Urban Development issued an audit of FHA’s Loss Mitigation Program (2014-KC-0004).  The Office of the Inspector General (the OIG) did the audit because of its “concern that FHA might have incurred costs while allowing lenders to make large amounts of money by modifying defaulted FHA-insured loans. Our audit objective was to determine the extent to which loans modified under the FHA program generated gains for the lenders.” (1)

The OIG found that

Lenders generated an estimated $428 million in gains from the sale of Government National Mortgage Association securities when modifying defaulted FHA loans in fiscal year 2013. These loan modifications were completed as part of FHA’s loss mitigation program. None of these lender generated gains were used to offset FHA’s insurance fund costs. As a result, FHA missed opportunities to strengthen its insurance fund. (1)

Given that the FHA had to be bailed out for the first time in its 80 year history, the findings of this audit are a bit heartbreaking, at least for a housing finance nerd like me.  $428 million would cover more than a quarter of the amount that Treasury had to advance to the FHA, no small potatoes.

The OIG found that the FHA “may have missed opportunities to strengthen its insurance fund. Lenders could be required to offset gains they obtained from the sale of securities for incentive fees and claims for modified loans that redefault.” (5)

The Auditee Comments and the OIG’s Evaluation of Auditee Comments make it clear that the extent of the gains had by lenders is very contested because the OIG did not “know the costs of the lenders.” (17) This seems like a pretty important missing piece of the story. Nonetheless, I hope that HUD, as the parent of both the FHA and Ginnie Mae, takes questions raised by this audit seriously to ensure that public monies are being put to their best use.

Regulating Fannie and Freddie With The Deal

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Steven Davidoff Solomon and David T. Zaring have posted After the Deal: Fannie, Freddie and the Financial Crisis Aftermath to SSRN. The abstract reads,

The dramatic events of the financial crisis led the government to respond with a new form of regulation. Regulation by deal bent the rule of law to rescue financial institutions through transactions and forced investments; it may have helped to save the economy, but it failed to observe a laundry list of basic principles of corporate and administrative law. We examine the aftermath of this kind of regulation through the lens of the current litigation between shareholders and the government over the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We conclude that while regulation by deal has a place in the government’s financial crisis toolkit, there must come a time when the law again takes firm hold. The shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who have sought damages from the government because its decision to eliminate dividends paid by the institutions, should be entitled to review of their claims for entire fairness under the Administrative Procedure Act – a solution that blends corporate law and administrative law. Our approach will discipline the government’s use of regulation by deal in future economic crises, and provide some ground rules for its exercise at the end of this one – without providing activist investors, whom we contend are becoming increasingly important players in regulation, with an unwarranted windfall.

Reading the briefs in the various GSE lawsuits, one feels lost in the details of the legal arguments and one thinks that the judges hearing these matters might feel the same way.  This article is an attempt to see the big picture, encompassing the administrative, corporate and takings law aspects of the dispute. However the judges decide these cases, one would assume that they will need to do something similar to come up with a result that they find just.

I also found plenty to argue with in this article.  For instance, it characterizes the Federal Housing Finance Administration as the lapdog of Treasury. (26) But there is a lot of evidence that the FHFA charted its own course away from the Executive Branch on many occasions, for instance when it rejected calls by various government officials for principal reductions for homeowners with Fannie and Freddie mortgages. Notwithstanding these disagreements, I think the article makes a real contribution in its attempt to make sense of an extraordinarily muddled situation.