Free Republic

The market has taken several days to digest The Fed’s decision to continue Operation Twist and start purchasing $40 billion per month in agency mortgage-backed securities. The MBS market thrives on uncertainty concerning future rates and prepayment speeds. When The Fed intentionally reduces mortgage rates through quantitative easing, it takes away one of the attractions of the MBS market: risk. Now agency MBS is pricing close to Treasuries. Freddie Mac’s 30 year mortgage commitment rate fell to 3.49%, almost to a new low. The spread between Fannie Mae current coupon and 10 year Treasury yields have fallen to 13.75 basis...

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in...

September 5, 2012 What Bill Clinton won’t say Tonight about His Role in Creating the Economic Mess John Rossomondo President Clinton likely will be silent this evening during his speech nominating President Obama for a second term about the role he played in setting the stage for the economic collapse that ensued a decade later.He will likely pin the blame for the current economic mess on his successor, George W. Bush, and claim that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to take Americans back to the failed policies of the past, while dodging his personal role.The former President currently appears...

President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices. As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans. The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama...

You have to give Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner some credit for spin: today the Treasury announced “Further Steps to Expedite Wind Down of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” The only problem is that the steps announced largely put the taxpayer at greater risk in order to protect holders of Fannie and Freddie debt. Essentially, the Treasury has amended its agreements with Fannie and Freddie so that the companies no longer have to pay a fixed dividend to the U.S. taxpayer, but instead “every dollar of profit” from the companies to the taxpayer. The problem is that the Government Sponsored Enterprises...

The Justice Department is beginning a major campaign against banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending, opening a new front in the Obama administration’s response to the foreclosure crisis. Tom Perez, the assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, is expected to announce Thursday in New York that the administration is creating a new unit that will focus exclusively on unfair lending practices. “We are looking at any and every practice in the industry,” Mr. Perez said in a recent interview. As part of an expansion of the Civil Rights Division approved by...

PERRIS: Fannie Mae abandoned horse, records show A horse that was found blind, starving and nearly crippled at a foreclosed home in Perris may have been a victim of Fannie Mae. I reported on the horse’s rescue last week by a couple of local good Samaritans, but I didn’t know who owned the property. I do now. It was Fannie Mae. That’s what the County Assessor’s records show, anyway. I had a feeling this was the case, based on an unreliable tip that was blurted at me by the real estate agent in charge of the property. When I called...

"The New Leviathan:""How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics""and Threatens America's Future" By David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin David Horowitz contends that tax-exempt organizations of the political left,who present themselves are more aligned with the concerns of the poor and working class than conservative groups and the Republican Party, have assets over 100 hundred billion dollars and outspend conservatives seven to one. The author argues that the Left has used their finances to promote a progressive agenda that has transformed the political landscape. David Horowitz speaks at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.

The former Countrywide Financial Corp., whose subprime loans helped start the nation's foreclosure crisis, made hundreds of discount loans to buy influence with members of Congress, congressional staff, top government officials and executives of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, according to a House report.

Anyone wanting to understand the beginnings of great economic collapse of 2008 should start with the book "Reckles$ Endangerment", by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Mortgenson is finally interviewed by Brian Lamb on this week's C-Span Q&A, and gets to tell a bit of the story of how government mismanagement and outright corruption in the early 90's set the stage for the wrecked economy in the late 00's. Lamb, for some reason, tries his best to turn a lot of the blame to Republicans, and Morgenson does the obligatory "both sides of the aisle" routine, but the names you'll hear...

The Democrat Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

Interesting stuff!!! Interview done by Stephen K. Bannon.

While speaking to Harvard Graduates this week Barney Frank took time to hammer a woman who challenged him at a town hall two years ago over his ideology. He then went on to explain that legislation he was promoting would not prevent pastors from speaking their views at the pulpit. "You can still call me a fag," Frank said and cited that at the time he was chair of the Finance Committee so he "wouldn't advise it if you were in the banking industry."

According to Freddie Mac, mortgage rates in the U.S. fell to a record for a third straight week. The average rate for a 30-year fixed loan dropped to 3.79 percent in the week ended today from 3.83 percent. Fannie Mae 30 year current coupons (the rate on Fannie Mae MBS) fell as well, but not to the lowest point in recent months.\ As Europe continues to experience a financial crisis, investors continue to invest in our Treasury market (driving down yields). 30 year mortgage rates follow the 10 year Treasury yield. Greece, Portugal and Spain continue to experience problems with...

Enterprise Community Investment, Inc. today announced the closing of the first loan under the Green Refinance Plus program, a partnership between Fannie Mae and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) introduced last year to incentivize energy and resource efficiency improvements in affordable housing.

In a potential turning point for one of the biggest financial crisis bailouts, Fannie Mae reported a first-quarter profit and—for the first time since the government seized it in 2008—does not need a quarterly infusion of taxpayer money. The $2.7-billion profit that the giant housing finance company posted Wednesday was its largest since the housing bubble burst in 2007 and is another signal that the real estate market finally might have hit bottom. "It's always hard to call a turn until everything is in the rear-view mirror," said Susan McFarland, Fannie Mae's chief financial officer. "It's certainly a positive indication...

Howard Zinn and Saul Alinsky must be looking down and smiling now, or up. “We reported on our Zinn Education Project Facebook site, which asked teachers about themes they planned to address in the coming month,” the editors of Rethinking Schools wrote in an editorial which appears in the Spring 2012 issue of the magazine. “The replies reflected a markedly unstandardized curriculum.” “People were teaching about the history of corporate personhood, the war in Afghanistan, the early women’s rights movement, and the link between industrialization and imperialism.” In other words, to these characters, elementary and high schools are not left-wing...

The Obama administration wants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which finance the bulk of U.S. mortgages, to start reducing loan balances for troubled borrowers, but with safeguards to prevent them from purposely defaulting to obtain relief.

I am making public the letter that I wrote to Senator Grassley (Feb. 23, 2011) regarding circumstances that led to my firing after 2.5 months by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), particularly my writing about mortgage fraud and its roots in mortgage securitization that CBO sought to deny was a problem. I was repeatedly pressured by the CBO Assistant Director, Deborah Lucas… to not write nor discuss issues in the banking sector and mortgage markets that might suggest weakness in these sectors and their consequences on the economy and households... …Issues at the heart of the foreclosure problems pertain to...

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has called on federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to place a "good-faith pause" on all foreclosure sales in the state following the multi-state settlement with the nation's largest banks over mortgage abuses.