GSEs

The end of one-party rule in Washington could move the needle on efforts to devise a new housing finance framework.

A U.S. regulator's plan to boost capital in the mortgage-finance giants won't work unless investors get "compensated" for the billions of dollars the government has collected from the companies in recent years, one shareholder said.

Borrowers buying new homes produced fewer loan applications than they did a year earlier due to October's rising interest rates.

Fannie Mae completed 10 traditional and front-end credit risk insurance transactions during 2018, sharing $2.6 billion of risk, including $192 million in its final deal of the year.

Borrowers will get more leeway to finance energy- and water-efficient improvements under a new program coming from Freddie Mac.

The revised blueprint by Moelis & Co. LLC incorporates a pending regulatory capital plan for the mortgage giants.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is leaving the government-sponsored enterprises' multifamily caps for 2019 unchanged at $35 billion per agency, but is making other changes to prerequisites for excluded loans.

The amount of mortgage credit available to consumers increased to a post-crisis high in October in reaction to more first-time homebuyers entering the market, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.

The unique approach Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are each taking with their credit-risk transfer products is quickly becoming a key point of differentiation that's rekindling competition between the government-sponsored enterprises.

Laurel Davis, VP, credit risk transfer at Fannie Mae, explains why the switch to a REMIC structure for CAS is important, and why it took so long.