This afternoon, an amendment protecting mortgage consumers from predatory lending practices made it into Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill. The Senate approved the amendment by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) 63 to 36.
The new language prohibits mortgage lenders from receiving hidden payments More…
The Senate just voted on two amendments tackling the loss-taking government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which stabilize the mortgage market at a $7 billion-per-month cost.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Judd Gregg’s (R-N.H.) amendment to end Fannie and Freddie’s governmental conservatorships within three years and More…
For the past year, Republicans have insisted that Congress take up legislation to stop the losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-sponsored enterprises that buy up and repackage mortgages, keeping loan prices stable. Fannie and Freddie have incurred more than $150 billion in losses since the burst More…
On mortgage giant Freddie Mac’s blog, “Featured Perspectives,” executive Don Bisenius takes on strategic defaulters — underwater mortgage-holders (that is, homeowners who owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth, meaning that if they sell their house they will still owe the bank money) who chose to More…
Today, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission continues its fourth round of hearings on the origins of the recession, with the current and former Treasury secretaries, Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson, speaking on the shadow banking system — comprising financial companies like Goldman Sachs that are technically not banks because they More…
Today, Freddie Mac — the government-sponsored enterprise that buys mortgages on the secondary market, and is currently under a Federal Housing Finance Agency conservatorship — reported losses of $6.7 billion in the first quarter.
It isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, but it is bad, and a sign More…
For months, Republicans have insisted that Congress should deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-sponsored enterprises backstopping 90 percent of mortgages, which have received around $125 billion in taxpayer aid — in financial regulatory reform.
But their financial regulatory reform counterproposal offered little by way of More…
Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, writes over at The New York Times’ Economix: “Adjusted for inflation, residential property values were still higher at the end of 2009 than 10 years ago. This fact raises the possibility that at least part of the housing boom was an efficient More…
Sudeep Reddy of The Wall Street Journal interviews James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the nation’s short-term interest rate.
Bullard says that the Fed might start selling off mortgage-backed securities — it More…
Over at the excellent Atlantic Business Channel, Daniel Indiviglio runs through the three major overlooked issues in Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill that economists and market-watchers flagged for The New York Times. The folks quoted cite credit runs in the shadow-banking sector (in English: old-fashioned More…
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