Compliance & Regulation

The Making Home Affordable program has been extended and expanded so many times that it's gotten hard to imagine life without it. But its two primary initiatives have served their purpose and the days may be numbered for HAMP and HARP.

Going forward, Fannie Mae will be relying more on loan guarantee fee income from its single-family and multifamily businesses.

Borrowers who have defaulted in the past are generally considered to be a bigger risk than those who have never missed a payment. Yet the early performance of bonds backed by rehabbed residential mortgages is pretty strong.

Fannie Mae will make a $919 million dividend payment to the U.S. Treasury Department after reporting a first-quarter profit driven by fees for guaranteeing loans against default and credit-related income.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced Wednesday it had raised a cap on the amount of multifamily loans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can buy from lenders, boosting it to $35 billion effective immediately.

Freddie Mac's second quarterly loss in less than a year makes it clear profitability is getting tougher as it shrinks. But it's a concern that must be weighed against more long-term efforts to reduce Freddie's overall credit risk exposure.

At least one banker has gone public with expectations that the OCC will force his institution to hold more capital. More could soon follow.

Industry groups are urging the Federal Housing Finance Agency to end the sweep of profits of the GSEs so that Fannie and Freddie can rebuild capital.

Bank of America Corp. said it reached a $190 million agreement to resolve a six-year-old legal claim from Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle over mortgage-backed securities sold before the financial crisis.

A federal judge approved Goldman Sachs Group's $272 million settlement with investors who claimed the bank misled them about the safety of billions of dollars worth of residential mortgage-backed securities.