The MReport Webcast: Wednesday 8/4/2015

Freddie Mac's net income increased nearly nine times from $524 million in Q1 to $4.2 billion in Q2, according to an announcement from Freddie Mac on Tuesday. Freddie Mac also reported $3.9 billion in comprehensive income, a five-fold increase from Q1's total of $746 million.

With the inclusion of September 2015's Dividend Obligation of $3.9 billion, Freddie Mac will have returned 96 point 5 billion dollars to taxpayers. Dividend payments do not include the $71.3 billion bailout Freddie Mac received from Treasury in 2008. The single-family purchase volume for Freddie Mac increased from Q1 to Q2 by about $20 billion, up to a total of $101.2 billion.

Banks reported stronger demand for mortgage loans and eased lending standards in a number of categories, suggesting positive growth in the second half of the year, according to the Federal Reserve July 2015 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey. Some of the banks surveyed reported issuing loans to households under eased lending standards for residential mortgage loans over the past three months on net. However, the majority of these banks most banks did not indicate any change in consumer loan standards and terms.