Government

In the response letter, dated April 21, 2015, Treasury's Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Randall DeValk said that wanted to "clarify some misunderstandings" from some press reports regarding the agreement, and said that the government's $187.5 billion bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with taxpayer funds in 2008 was not an "ordinary" loan.

A core argument of the report is that the government’s attempt to handle the economic disasters of the past several decades have resulted in a bloated and redundant regulatory infrastructure that has made a mess of its own efforts to police the nation’s financial system.

Quicken, the largest lender of Federal Housing Administration mortgage loans in the country, filed its suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, claiming the agencies have been trying to bully the company into making “blatantly false” statements and demanding the company pay “an inexplicable penalty or face legal action,” according to a statement released by Quicken Friday.

In order to prevent these losses in the future, the GSEs moved to strengthen their financial requirements of approved PMI insurers, thus reducing overall risk. The new requirements will ensure that PMIs can meet their agreed-upon obligations regardless of current economic conditions or the marketplace.

“Get Financially Fit In and Around Your Home” rounds out National Financial Literacy Month with a discussion on what prospective homebuyers can learn and what existing homeowners can do to bring down expenses.

Lockhart said before a monetary policy liftoff decision is made, he would like to see data that the desired outcomes are being achieved – but he said support for a monetary policy liftoff decision will be a judgment call. But in the big overall economic picture, he said, strength in one aspect of the economy may offset ambiguity in another area.

Tuesday’s passage of proposed amendments to the Dodd-Frank Act in the House has reheated the debate over whether the changes really serve lower-income Americans who purchase manufactured homes or opens them up to predatory lenders on a large scale.

Most Fed districts reported improvement in residential real estate, namely Cleveland, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The remaining districts reported steady residential real estate activity, except for New York, which said conditions were softening. Construction activity slowed in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Dallas due to harsh winter weather conditions.

The first measure, which passed 263-162, would alter the meaning of “high cost" mortgages for manufactured housing by exempting mortgages from the classification if the transaction is less than $75,000, the annual percentage rate is 10 percent or lower, and if the mortgage points and fees don’t exceed $3,000.

The Fed wants to permit interest payments on certain balances to be based on a daily rate, rather than on a maintenance period average rate, as it has existed for years. It is proposing to rewrite rules defining interest on reserve-balance (IORR) and interest on excessive-balance (IOER) rates.