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Freddie Mac posted its second largest profit and will pay $4.4 billion to Treasury. This is in spite of flat mortgage purchase applications. In other words, Death Valley for households. mbapurcch080713 Senior preferred stock outstanding and held by Treasury remained $72.3 billion, as dividend payments do not reduce prior Treasury draws. Of course, shrinking mortgage delinquencies coupled with skyrocketing house prices translates into higher profits. mbadlinghp To be quite frank, improving profits at both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will likely slow down the impetus for the GSE change that President Obama claims to support. Thanks to the vigilance of...

Back in September of 2008, Sarah Palin spoke at a Colorado Springs rally. During her address, she lamented the all-encompassing power of government sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She argued that a potential McCain administration would rein the companies in. As she put it: “John McCain has been calling for years to reform things and cut bureaucracy, even at the lending agencies that our government supports. The fact is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers. The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for...

President Barack Obama on Wednesday, in his speech on the U.S. economy, spelled out the beginning of the end for federally controlled mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “We’ll work with both parties to turn the page on Fannie and Freddie, and build a housing finance system that’s rock-solid for future generations,” Obama said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. See more Obama speech coverage. That might take a while. True, both the House and the Senate are working on legislation to get rid of the giants, which were took under control by the federal government in...

Buoyed by an improving housing market, President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed a broad overhaul of the nation's mortgage finance system, including winding down government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He declared that taxpayers should never again be left "holding the bag" for the mortgage giants' bad bets. Obama outlined his proposals in Phoenix, the once foreclosure-riddled city at the epicenter of the nation's housing crisis. The housing market in Phoenix, as well as in many other parts of the country, has rebounded robustly, with prices in the southwestern city up 66 percent from the low point in 2011...

Big Government: President Obama is renewing calls to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But it's just another ruse to prevent these costly government failures from being privatized. While outlining his plan Tuesday in a housing speech in Phoenix, Obama proved he's the master of talking out of both sides of his mouth. In one breath, he encouraged the private market to take a bigger role in home lending, and even suggested the government's role should be limited. Yet in the next, he argued the government still plays a vital role in the mortgage market by guaranteeing "affordable housing" for...

Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, the nation's first openly gay member of Congress and liberal darling, implied in a recent interview that he is also a "pot-smoking atheist." Frank, a Democrat who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013, made his comments last Friday while serving as a guest on a talk show hosted by Bill Maher, a stand-up comedian known for his atheist, liberal-slanted comedy routine. Maher then went on to say that Frank was lucky to have worked in a "safe district" which didn't receive the kind of media...

President Obama will urge Congress to shutter Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-giants bailed out by the government in 2008, as part of a strategy to buffer taxpayers from future housing market downturns. In a speech Tuesday in Phoenix, Obama will call for transitioning the business model of Fannie and Freddie into a system where "private capital must be wiped out before the government pays on any form of catastrophic guarantee," a senior administration official said. Obama will also renew his calls for sweeping mortgage refinancing legislation when he travels to Phoenix Tuesday. Arizona's desert capital was the epicenter...

President Barack Obama is proposing to overhaul the nation’s mortgage finance system, including shutting down government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—a plan with bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Obama will also insist that popular 30-year mortgages be widely available to borrowers, even in a system that would rely more on the private sector than the government to guarantee loans. The president was to outline his proposals Tuesday at a construction company in Phoenix, once the epicenter of the housing crisis following the 2008 economic collapse. The housing market in the region, as in much of the country, has rebounded in...

An alleged "worst case scenario" shows the FHA could lose as much as $115 Billion. Since these worst case scenarios are always famously optimistic, the best course of action would be to shut the agency down. I was quoted as saying just that by the Heartland in Congressional Report Raises Spectre of FHA Bailout. The Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) losses over the next 30 years could be much higher than originally projected, according to the findings of a congressional committee. The dismal forecast has some bracing for another taxpayer-financed bailout. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep....

Fannie And Freddie Are Getting Smoked — Down 40% Today Sam Ro May 29, 2013, 11:48 AM Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are getting destroyed today. Stifel Nicolaus' Dave Lutz points us to reports that Senator Bob Corker will push to wind down Fannie and Freddie as part of housing finance reform. Fannie and Freddie are government sponsored enterprises (GSE) that were created to boost liquidity in the mortgage markets buy packaging mortgages and selling them off to investors as bonds (or mortgage-back securities). These MBS also came with implicit guarantees, which got the them into trouble when...

Mel Watt, President Obama’s nominee for director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, pushed government programs to help welfare recipients buy homes during the creation of the subprime mortgage bubble. Watt, a 20-year Member of Congress from North Carolina’s 12th district, also had a hand in programs allowing borrowers with poor credit to buy homes with no down payment. The American financial system was subsequently destroyed when millions of bad borrowers defaulted on their loans, setting off a market crash that wiped out nearly 40 percent of the net worth of Americans. In 2002, Watt teamed up with Freddie Mac...

Fannie Mae — the much-hated, government-backed entity that needed a massive bailout and gets accused of inflating the housing bubble -- just reported its biggest annual profit in history.From the announcement that came out this morning:Fannie Mae (FNMA/OTC) today reported annual net income of $17.2 billion for 2012 and quarterly net income of $7.6 billion for the fourth quarter of 2012, compared with a net loss of $16.9 billion for 2011. The improvement in the company’s full-year and quarterly net income was due primarily to improved credit results driven by a decline in serious delinquency rates, an increase in home...

"The biggest problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is that they are financial institutions with a social mission," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. That social mission, critics say, is to heavily subsidize mortgages for people who don't meet sound lending qualifications. "Lower income homes have a tougher time paying mortgages and when the housing market started to go under, that was the first to go," Schatz said.

Yes, we have yet another government mortgage modification program. This makes the 15th government mortgage modification program to go along with HAMP, HARP, the Attorneys General Settlement and their various contortions. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) today announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will offer a new, simplified loan modification initiative to minimize losses and to help troubled borrowers avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. Beginning July 1, servicers will be required to offer eligible borrowers who are at least 90 days delinquent on their mortgage an easy way to lower their monthly payments and modify their...

IN a perfect world, policy makers, legislators and concerned Americans would have spent the last few years conducting an honest dialogue about two important issues: how to resolve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned mortgage finance giants, and how to create a housing finance system that would serve borrowers without imperiling taxpayers. But ours is an imperfect world, and discussions about these questions have taken place mostly behind closed doors in Washington. The rest of us Americans, who guarantee the mortgage market, have not been given much of a say. This is a pity because the future of housing...

Bartiromo Takes Frank to Task Over Lack of ’08 Financial Crisis Prosecutions • Frank: 'Individuals' should be prosecuted on Wall Street, will not say who Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) advocated criminal prosecutions against “individuals” involved in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent collapse on Wall Street Friday on CNBC. Maria Bartiromo reacted incredulously to Frank’s refusal to name specific individuals who may have perpetrated criminal wrongdoing, accusing the former Congressman of playing populist politics by making specious allegations against the financial industry. Frank attempted to deflect the criticism by stating as Chair of House Financial Services...

In charges filed late Monday in Los Angeles federal court, the Justice Department said S&P gave high marks to mortgage-backed securities that later went sour, even though it knew they were risky. The government said S&P misrepresented the risks because it wanted more business from the banks. The case is the government's first major action against one of the credit rating agencies that stamped their seals of approval on Wall Street's mortgage bundles. It marks a milestone for the Justice Department, which has been criticized for failing to make bigger cases against the companies involved in the crisis. "Put simply,...

Neighbors and activists, who stood out in the bitter cold for more an hour on Wednesday morning to protest the planned eviction of Jeffery Solivan of 32 Edgemont St., cheered after hearing that Fannie Mae had canceled its action. The protest kicked off just before 8 a.m., initially with about a dozen people and grew to about 30 people when word came that the eviction was off. No date has been given for a new eviction. Solivan said he hopes something can be negotiated with the lender that will allow him to keep his home, in the Pine Point neighborhood....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will name close aide Tom Donilon as his new national security adviser on Friday in a move that could have implications for the struggli

Policy-wise, this is an oldie but a goodie, I guess, even though we’re still spending tons of money on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae more than four years after the crash. Wells Fargo CEO Robert Kovacevich can't believe that we haven't learned the lesson from 2008 and gotten the government out of the home mortgage industry, and tells CNBC's Squawk Box that the two organizations made that crash exponentially worse than it needed to be: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exacerbated the 2008 mortgage crisis, and that’s why the U.S. government should get out...