Government

Speaking as a guest presenter at the Rotary Club of Atlanta on Monday, Fannie Mae President and CEO Timothy Mayopoulos warned against any type of reform where housing finance is concerned, telling the audience that "the (current) system works," according to a report.

The case scheduled to be heard later this month centers on claims that the Texas state housing department's fixed criteria for approving tax credits for low-income housing developers resulted in the approval of such credits for a larger percentage of developers in areas more heavily populated by minorities than in areas more populated by whites.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) may have to pay additional penalties to settle claims that it sold faulty U.S. mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the housing market crash, according to a report from Reuters.

Total construction spending for November fell 0.3 percent from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $975 billion, the Commerce Department reported Friday. Economists polled by Econoday predicted a 0.5 percent pickup.

The Great Neck, New York-based Golden First agreed to pay $36 million to settle a complaint originally filed by the United States in April 2013 and amended in August 2013. In the complaint, the government accuses Golden First of violating the False Claims Act through years of misconduct relating to the mortgage company's participation in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)'s Direct Endorsement Lender Program.

From the start of QM to the end of quantitative easing, the past year saw plenty of big news in the mortgage and financial markets. As the new year rolls in, MReport is taking a look at some of the biggest FHFA headlines of 2014.

A day after Ocwen Financial Corp. announced a multi-million dollar agreement to resolve investigations by New York's top regulator, investors and market watchers remain skeptical that the company's problems are settled.

Amid reports of subdued home sales in the year's closing months, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) delivered a piece of good news in the form of continued house price gains. The agency's latest House Price Index (HPI) showed a month-to-month gain of 0.6 percent in October, picking up steam after posting no change in September.

According to a third reading released Tuesday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annualized rate of 5.0 percent in Q3, up from an earlier estimate of 3.9 percent and an estimate of 4.6 percent in the second quarter.

The latest data from OCC shows that out of a portfolio totaling 23.6 million loans with a combined unpaid principal balance of about $4.0 billion (about 46 percent of residential mortgages in the U.S.), the percentage of current and performing mortgages increased both quarter-over-quarter (from 92.9 percent to 93.0 percent) and year-over-year (from 91.4 percent to 93.0 percent) in Q3.