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The Federal Housing Finance Agency in the Trump administration had been preoccupied with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s capital position. Acting Director Sandra Thompson has shifted the agency’s focus to affordable housing and fair lending.

Infrastructure will command most of lawmakers’ attention, but expect banks to keep pushing for bills that would ease the transition away from a key benchmark rate and help them serve legal cannabis businesses.

The Federal Reserve told a judge not to scrap Libor as requested by consumers in a lawsuit because it would pose a risk to financial stability and undermine years of global planning for a transition to a new benchmark for borrowing rates.

Financial institutions will have until early October to weigh in about new risk-based capital requirements for nonbanks.

This year's assessment for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the first to take into account a January agreement between the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury Department that allowed the companies to retain more earnings.

The guarantor of mortgage-backed securities has been without a Senate-confirmed president for four and a half years. The vacancy makes it difficult for other government agencies to coordinate housing objectives, according to stakeholders.

The agency developed measures taking effect Aug. 31 that, among other things, will allow lenders to prioritize foreclosures of the most impaired loans and then focus on modifying salvageable ones.

In assuming that credit unions have the same risk profile as nonbank lenders, the mortgage insurer is now threatening to exclude nearly a quarter of them from being qualified issuers of the securities it backs, writes the Senior Director Of Advocacy and Counsel at the Credit Union National Association.

The acquisition of Florida-based Service Finance Co. would expand the North Carolina bank’s presence in the point-of-sale lending business.

Tight inventory and heightened competition kept prime purchasers at bay as property values continued their summer surge, according to Fannie Mae.