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Mortgage giant Fannie Mae posted net income of $1.1 billion for the first quarter, down from a year ago as declining interest rates reduced the value of the financial instruments it uses to hedge against rate swings. […] Washington-based Fannie is paying a dividend of $919 million to the U.S. Treasury next month. Fannie will then have paid a total $148.5 billion in dividends, exceeding the $116 billion it received from taxpayers during the financial crisis. …

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.

Fannie Mae, the state-sponsored U.S. mortgage backer, is at risk of needing a government bailout that could shake confidence in the housing finance market, senior officials have warned. Fannie Mae's chief executive and its regulator are sounding the alarm on a decline in the institution's capital cushion, which is on course to vanish in 2018, when it would have to ask the US Treasury for emergency funds. Their warnings highlight Washington's inaction on housing policy and its failure to reform the institution, which guarantees nearly $3 trillion of securities and enables 30-year fixed rate loans, following the last financial crisis....

Fannie Mae, the federally sanctioned mortgage giant, has just announced a new program that shows that they learned absolutely nothing from the last real estate meltdown. This new program, called "HomeReady" in a fit of hopeful and wishful thinking, reduces loan underwriting standards. It's designed to allow "underserved" individuals the opportunity to buy a home - focused primarily on low-income and minority borrowers. Other than the last group of under qualified borrower-friendly loans and regulations from the mid-2000s, it's the stupidest real estate loan idea that I've ever seen. The new loan "features" reduced credit score requirements and allows borrowed...

Movie sequels are rarely as good as the original films on which they're based. The same dictum, it appears, holds for finance. The 2008 housing market collapse was bad enough, but it appears now that we're on the verge of experiencing it all again. And the financial sequel, working from a similar script as its original version, could prove to be just as devastating to the American taxpayer. The Federal National Mortgage Association (commonly referred to as Fannie Mae) plans a mortgage loan reboot, which could produce the same insane and predictable results as when the mortgage agency loaned so...

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...

If the Bergdahl uproar feels creepily reminiscent of the Benghazi uproar, or the Syrian "red line" uproar, or the choose-your-own- Obama -foreign-adventure uproar, it's because they all have a common denominator. This is what happens when political hacks formally take over foreign policy. It's the "formal" point that bears some meditation. Barack Obama isn't the first president to make foreign-policy decisions on the basis of domestic political calculations. He does, however, win the distinction of being the first president to utterly disregard—to treat with contempt—the institutions and procedures that were designed to help the commander in chief insulate the serious...

In the wake of two videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts, Republicans in Congress are working to ensure that Planned Parenthood is stripped of its federal funding. However, it’s not only the government that fills Planned Parenthood’s coffers. According to 2nd Vote, a website and app that tracks the flow of money from consumers to political causes, more than 25 percent of Planned Parenthood’s $1.3-billion annual revenue comes from private donations, which includes corporate contributions. 2nd Vote researched the corporations and organizations to find which supported Planned Parenthood and found that more...

It wasn't greed that caused the mortgage mess. In large part, the mess was the product of government policies designed to increase home ownership among the poor and ethnic minorities. Today Peter Wallison points out how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA created a demand for bad mortgages that encouraged mortgage brokers to generate millions of them. From the Wall Street Journal: Mortgage brokers had to be able to sell their mortgages to someone. They could only produce what those above them in the distribution chain wanted to buy. In other words, they could only respond to demand, not...

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,...

A national fair housing organization has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, charging that Fannie Mae is not properly caring for and marketing foreclosed homes it owns in nonwhite communities. The National Fair Housing Alliance alleges Fannie Mae violated the federal Fair Housing Act in nonwhite, working-class communities in the Chicago area as well as in 33 other metropolitan areas. Nineteen fair housing groups in various cities, including three in the Chicago area, joined the alliance in the complaint against Fannie Mae. "Fannie has more foreclosures in the United States than anybody else," said...

Let's collaboratively build a timeline of this disaster, starting with when these agencies were formed, tracking the legislation that was not only passed, but proposed, and quotes from who supported and opposed it. PLEASE INCLUDE URLs so we can link to sources. Here's a start. 1938 Fannie Mae, or the Federal National Mortgage Association, was founded in 1938. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode12/usc_sup_01_12_10_13_20_III.html 1954 1954 Charter Act 1968 1968 Charter Act 1970 Freddie Mac, or the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, was established in 1970 1989 Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 1990, James A. Johnson went to work for Fannie...

n 1986, I was as ready to leave the closet as I would ever be—but how would I do so? Though I was a third term Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, I had lived too long with the burden of “the gay thing” to treat coming out as a political matter alone. For many years, I was ashamed of myself for hiding my membership in a universally despised group. I’d been afraid of exposure, and angry at myself for my self-denial. I’d felt shame as I watched younger gay men and lesbians confront the bigots openly with a courage that I...

Extortion: After 16 banks caved in to White House demands to refund billions in losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one outlier remains unrepentant. Nomura Holdings refuses to succumb to the political shakedown. The Japanese bank's U.S. unit won't give in to extortionist regulators protecting Fannie/Freddie who claim it hoodwinked the toxic twins into buying pools of subprime mortgages, like it claimed Bank of America, JPMorgan and other U.S. banks did in the run-up to the mortgage crisis. The government demands $1 billion in damages. Nomura says it won't give a dime toward the $18 billion ransom the feds...

At a breakout session during the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, one of us posed a question to the audience: What do members of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have in common?Hint: it has something to do with the 2008 bailout of private banks by American taxpayers. The insidious stink from that sorry episode lingers to this day—on both parties. Now the reasons for outrage over the bailouts were different for each group. For the Tea Partiers it was an unwarranted intrusion into the free market; for the Occupiers a taxpayer-financed gift to wealthy executives they believe caused...

WASHINGTON — Mortgages with low down payments can be just as safe if other underwriting conditions are met, a federal housing regulator said Tuesday. Mel Watt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was testifying in front of the House Financial Services Committee, after Fannie Mae FNMA, +0.47% and Freddie Mac FMCC, +0.47% both started making mortgages available to those who make down payments of just 3%. That has raised the ire of Republicans, who say the move risks a repeat of the housing bubble. “All things being equal, is a 3% down loan riskier to the taxpayer than...

France, Israel and Saudi Arabia confront an administration conducting a make-believe foreign policy. When the history of the Obama administration's foreign policy is written 20 or so years from now, the career of Wendy Sherman, our chief nuclear negotiator with Iran, will be instructive. In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governor carried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity...

The chants cut through the warm, humid air like an approaching cold front, prompting drivers to crane their necks and pedestrians to stop in their tracks on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Post Office on Liberty Street. "No justice, no peace, no more people in the streets." "What do we do when banks attack? Stand up, fight back." The protesters' numbers were few – less than 20 – but the collective voice of Springfield No One Leaves was mighty as the group took aim at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered government-sponsored mortgage enterprises bailed out by taxpayers, and...

The Chinese “received a message from the Russians” back in 2008 suggesting a pact to sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities on the market, which would have nudged down the price of the debt of Fannie and Freddie and also maximized the chaos on Wall Street, a former U.S. official told BBC. It confirms a report that TheBlaze TV’s For the Record first aired back in September 2013.