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The Freddie Mac 30-year mortgage commitment rate rose to 3.12%. But once we subtract the gut-wrenching inflation rate, the REAL 30-year mortgage rate is -3.689%. The nominal Freddie Mac 30-year commitment rate rose to 3.12% which is still lower than 3.18% back on April 1, 2021 after surge in rates following Biden’s taking the office of Presidency in January. Meanwhile, the REAL Case-Shiller National home price index (CS National YoY – CPI YoY) is growing at the fastest rate in history. Great if you already own a home, but lethal if you are renting and want to move to homeownership....

A top U.S. regulator is considering taking steps to ease strains on mortgage companies facing a cash crunch as millions of Americans struggling with fallout from the coronavirus suspend their monthly payments, according to people familiar with the matter. The Federal Housing Finance Agency is weighing whether to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage-finance giants, to buy home loans that recently entered forbearance, meaning borrowers have stopped making payments, the people said. That would help nonbank mortgage companies that lend to home buyers and then quickly sell the loans to Fannie and Freddie. The strategy was upended...

The level of government interference and taxpayer exposure in the housing market has always been a huge problem. Higher education and mortgages have been key weapons of social engineering. The creation of massive amounts of debt and the entanglement of the government and taxpayers in mortgages was a major cause of the last economic meltdown. The solution here is at best incomplete, but it's a reasonable next step. Especially when dealing with 2020 Democrats who would love nothing more than to create another trillion dollar catastrophe by bribing their voters like crazy. The Trump administration on Thursday released its first...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) rolled out a plan to offer grants up to $25,000 to low-income black individuals to help with a down payment and closing costs on home purchases.At first glance, to the economically uninformed, this seems like it's a good idea. We want as many people as possible to own homes for many obvious reasons.Why not subsidize low-income buyers with a $25,000 grant? This would mean that it would be easier to buy a house in a low-income area. The more houses that are bought, the higher the demand, and prices will rise, benefitting everyone.But as with all...

The gatekeepers of the American mortgage market are increasingly backing loans to borrowers who have heavy debt loads, highlighting questions about mortgage risk as policy makers debate ways to change the system. Almost 30% of loans that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac packaged into bonds last year went to home buyers whose total debt payments amounted to more than 43% of their incomes, according to an analysis by industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. The share has nearly doubled since 2015. Data on other government mortgage programs also show an increase. The backing of these loans opens up...

Dems Nuked the Filibuster to Confirm Him, Then He Turned to Sexual Harassment Another lingering scandal from Obama’s “scandal-free” administration. February 22, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 16 see comments at FrontPage Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism In the fall of 2013, the Democrats were outraged that Republicans were blocking Obama’s nomination of Rep. Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Watt was African-American and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his minions repeatedly tried to associate the move with...

Former federal housing agency director Mel Watt, who represented Charlotte in the U.S. Congress for more than two decades, misused his position to pursue a relationship with a woman working for him, according to a formal inquiry by the agency’s Inspector General. Watt was head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which currently oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from 2014 through January when his five-year term expired. Simone Grimes, a special adviser at the agency, claimed that the 73-year-old Watt sexually harassed her and did not promote her when she declined his advances. Grimes also filed a pay discrimination...

New HomeOne mortgage has no geographic or income restrictions. It’s been more than three years since Freddie Mac rolled out a conventional mortgage that only required a 3% down payment for certain borrowers. The program, which is designed for qualified low-and moderate-income borrowers, saw reasonable progress over the last few years, with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt telling Congress last year that Freddie’s 3% down program (along with a similar one from Fannie Mae) was continuing to grow. But now, Freddie Mac is about to supercharge its 3% down program and launch a widespread expansion of the offering....

A pair of top Obama-appointed bank regulators still serving in the Trump administration could spark another mortgage meltdown by lowering credit standards and encouraging risky lending practices. Democrat Mel Watt, who is serving a special five-year term as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is pushing the mortgage-lending giants he regulates — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to offer home loans to deadbeat borrowers with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market crash, industry officials warn. Meanwhile, the other Obama holdover — liberal Democrat Richard Cordray, who continues to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through 2018...

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President Obama never was shy about using his phone and pen to achieve what he could not get from Congress on regulatory matters. But documents revealed last week show the Obama administration may have been willing to get around congressional decisions on spending by using a slush fund of sorts funded by the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored home loan giants. Fannie and Freddie are federally chartered enterprises which buy mortgage loans from banks and bundle them into securities that are sold to investors, thus freeing up capital so that banks can make more home...

This is the video of an interview after the close on CNBC by Kelly Evans of Dick Bove and Josh Rosner on the NYT story by Gretchen Morgenson that showed the Obama Administration changed the agreement between the US Government and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by fiat ruling. Play the video at the link. If you think this isn't worth it, just note that the video has been buried off their front page . . . since it slaps the Obama people right in the face and heaven forbid that happens on an NBC property.

Complete Headline: Obamacare Implosion Now? Since Obama Siphoned GSE Dividends To Prop Up, Can Trump Simply Halt 1st Qtr Sweep? Earlier this month, Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Corsi of InfoWars (@jerome_corsi) and a CPA "who worked for two years for a major U.S. accounting firm as an outside auditor for Freddie Mac," confirmed a 2012 scheme hatched by the Obama administration to funnel hundreds of billions in dividends from Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop up the failing Obamacare program - by paying subsidies to insurers to remain in the system. [Snip] The conclusion reached by...

One unresolved issue from the financial crisis is the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two firms that stand behind much of America’s housing market. Fannie and Freddie purchase mortgages, bundle them into securities and sell them on to investors with a guarantee. When America’s housing market collapsed a decade ago, the government had to bail them out. Its treatment of the firms since then has created a titanic legal struggle. Shareholders have cried foul. On February 21st, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling in the government’s favour. At issue is the Obama administration’s decision in 2012...

When Washington took over the beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis of 2008, it was with the implicit promise that they would be returned to shareholders after being nursed back to health. But now, with the unsealing of documents this week that were produced as part of a lawsuit filed against the government, new evidence is coming to light on how intimately the White House was involved in the Treasury’s decision in August 2012 to keep all the companies’ profits for the government. That move effectively maintained...

According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab....

Fannie Mae reported the number of REO declined to 57,253 at the end of 2015 compared to 87,063 at the end of 2014... Freddie Mac reported the number of REO (Real Estate Owned) declined to 17,004 at the end of 2015 compared to 25,768 at the end of 2014. REO inventory decreased in Q4 for both Fannie and Freddie, and combined inventory is down 34% year-over-year. For Freddie, this is the lowest level of REO since Q4 2007.  For Fannie, this is the lowest level since Q2 2008.

Completes seventh non-performing loan sale. Freddie Mac announced late Friday that it sold $305 million in seriously delinquent loans from its mortgage investment portfolio. The sale, which was initially announced last month, was completed via auction, with two pools containing 1,611 total loans being sold to a pair of buyers. According to Freddie Mac, these loans have been delinquent for approximately two years, on average. In its announcement, Freddie Mac said that given the deep delinquency status of the loans, the borrowers have likely been evaluated previously for or are already in various stages of loss mitigation, including modification or...

Everybody knows that “greedy bankers” were to blame for the Crash of 2008. The Democrats and their willing accomplices told us that years ago and they are sticking to their story. But there is another suspect that ought to be right in the dock along with the bankers. Its mild-mannered name is “agency debt.” It’s the debt of federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that is not included in the National Debt. In other words, when you go to the U.S. Treasury’s Debt to the Penny page, and find that on September 27, 2015 the debt was $18,151,073,031,331.50 you...

Received wisdom about the 2008 financial crisis has not been faring well lately. Peter Wallison, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, demonstrates in a new book that the subprime housing boom was fostered mainly by federal housing politics and policy, not by the rampant "deregulation" that many have imagined out of whole cloth. Another revelation: The New York Fed staff, as we belatedly learned last year, prepared an analysis showing that Lehman at the time of its collapse was theoretically solvent after all... OK, what about "too big to fail"? Nobody has found an email from a CEO saying,...