U.S Housing Giants Continue Losses

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are known to be “too big to fail”….at least that’s what the U.S had said up until the 2008 financial crisis.

In 1968 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had become a government-sponsored enterprise, a term insinuating that the government would always be there to bail them out if needed.

In 2008, the government was there to do just that.

With extreme lending of subprime mortgages, the economy quickly began to fail. Individuals were able to get mortgages they were unable to repay, something that would have been easily foreseeable, had the lenders set stricter requirements.

In this time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had borrowed over $187 billion. And now, finally, they have repaid to the full amount and more…leaving the Trump administration to decide what to do next.

With reporting of a fourth-quarter net loss, it is obvious they have yet to recover to pre-crisis standards, and neither is it surprising that they are looking for taxpayer help with the new tax bill that has been passed by the trump administration.

This crisis begs …

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How Do American Mortgages Work? Part 9: The Financial Crisis

What caused the Housing Bubble in the United States during the early 200s? Experts’ continuous debate on what the root of the cause is but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have less to do with it than you think. Fannie and Freddie backed about half of all the home-loan originations in 2002 but a new market for mortgage-backed securities were arising. Loan originators backed by Wall Street were straying away from selling the loans to Fannie and Freddie but creating their own mortgage backed securities with high-risk subprime mortgages. These would include something called a hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages with balloon payments which are nearly impossible to sustain without refinancing. It left Fannie and Freddie only backing up around 30% of the loans in 2005 and 2006.

The big players of Wall Street like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns would package the subprime loans into securities. The credit-rating agency would then rate them falsely-high so they can sell to investors who were unaware of the actual health of the security. Everyone saw how the housing prices were rising and didn’t see …

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How Do American Mortgages Work? Part 5: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The main goal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is to give the national mortgage market some liquidity. They purchase the loans from the mortgage firms (only under strict standards with size, credit score, and underwriting). For the next step, they package up the loans into Mortgage-backed securities, which they guarantee the payments on the securities to the investors even if a mortgage defaults.

These standards led to a more reliable ad sustainable mortgage products with longer terms and fixed-rate mortgages. On top of that investors knew that even if a mortgage defaults in their invested security, Fannie and Freddie will supplement the payments to them. Which made mortgage securities seem like a safe and sustainable investment.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 in part of the New Deal Legislation to help with the housing crisis during the Great Depression. The goal was to buy all the FHA-insured loans to help recover the lenders’ money supply. It was originally apart of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

Freddie Mac was established in 1970 to keep the supply of money moving for …

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How Do American Mortgages Work? Part 4: Aggregator

The next step into the Secondary Mortgage Market process in the aggregator. The aggregator buys the mortgages from banks and other originators. It then packages them up as mortgage-backed securities and sells it to securities dealers.

These mortgage-backed securities are investment opportunities that are bundled up mortgages. The aggregators send them off to a rating agency to be rated on their risk of money loss. They securitise the mortgages to either form a private label mortgage-backed security (think of Wall Street) or form agency mortgage-backed security (think of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). They then sell it to large institutional investors, insurance companies, hedge funds, and wealthy clients.

This is a complicated process because they have to make sure they receive a profit so before a security is sold a process called hedging a mortgage pipeline is involved. They make profit by the gap between the sales tag on the mortgages they obtain and the price the mortgage-backed securities sell for.

http://budgeting.thenest.com/definition-mortgage-aggregator-34152.html

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/07/secondary_mortgage.asp

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