I’m a big fan of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Fred® economic data website and they’ve developed and increase their access to more data through mobile apps and my favorite Microsoft® Excel® add-in’s and now they’ve added another feature to their arsenal of data medium offerings. This new offering surrounding their “Primary Mortgage Market Survey data” where one can view a data table or even more intuitively a slew of graphs based on filters parceled out by region or as an aggregate of Freddie Mac data allows user to gain access to key data and immediately refabricate the data into nice charts where recession times are shaded and percentage changes could be amended on the fly. Again a big two thumbs up to the folks at the St. Louis Fed for being at the cuff of leading with analytics.
Monday, February 20, 2012
The St. Louis Fred® on the cutting edge of data slap chop
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Risk Retention and its Disassembling Consequence
With the idiosyncrasy and instability in financial economic markets, the long-awaited proposal of the Dodd-Frank Act’s risk retention requirement was released on March 29th with the SEC acting on it on March 30th. This proposal pays attention to the mortgage securitization and exempted classes of loans referred to as the “Qualified Residential Mortgages” or QRMs.
The proposal states that for a loan to qualify for GSE backing the borrower must make at least a 20% down payment or at least 25% of the mortgage is to be refinance or 30% if it’s a cash-out refinance. The big change with the proposal is that loans with a federal guarantee such as from FHA, Fannie or Freddie backing are exempt from risk retention during their conservatorship.
So what does this mean? Down the future it could make it more difficult for private securitization of competitors thus impacting the ability of prospective borrowers to get approved and most importantly making the road longer and challenging to unwind the federal support of the GSEs housing finance support. Here is the proposal link:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/bcreg/bcreg20110329a1.pdf