Compliance & Regulation

Fannie Mae granted more than 11,000 exceptions to its lending standards for single-family mortgages it owned in early 2005, according to a new government report attempting to explain how Fannie's portfolio faltered during the housing bubble.

In competitive sports, being first is always the goal. But the distance between the U.S. - at the head of the pack - and the rest of the world in crafting financial reforms is becoming a major hurdle for implementing the Dodd-Frank Act.

Wells Fargo/Wells Fargo Funding isn't saying much about its 'exclusionary list' of mortgage firms that it will not buy loans from in the secondary market. (National Mortgage News has been reporting on the issue since Monday.) And of course, correspondent lenders want to know one thing and one thing only: Am I on the list?

The National Credit Union Administration said it will receive roughly $5.25 million from HSBC for settling claims against the banking giant related to mortgage-backed securities it sold to five now defunct corporate credit unions.

Administration officials are trying to get the Federal Housing Finance Agency to reconsider its resistance to principal reductions on loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told lawmakers Wednesday.

Days after he suggested smaller depositories should be subjected to different consumer-compliance rules than larger ones, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said regulators simply should consider the differences between financial institutions when crafting rules for everyone.

Delaware can now officially go after violators of the state's new Mortgage Loan Modification Services Act, which is aimed at protecting homeowners from providers offering these services in unfair or deceptive ways.

Mortgage bank scorecards are changing an industry that has not yet found the right balance between efficient rating standards and regulated oversight.

The Federal Housing Administration has revamped a little used program for refinancing underwater conventional loans, and extended its "short refinance" program until the end of 2014.

A federal judge declined Tuesday to dismiss charges that Barclays Capital packed a collateralized debt obligation it sold to Eastern Financial Florida CU with junk, hastening the demise of the one-time $2.4 billion credit union, the biggest natural person credit union failure ever.