A Mortgage Market Out of Balance By Peter Eavis New York Times DealBook Investment Banking Investment Services September 6, 2013. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/a-mortgage-market-out-of-balance/?_r=0
The above linked article mentions put-back-risk as a possible cause for what, on its face, appears to be an economic anomaly in the current pricing of mortgages. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading articles which discuss mortgage put-backs and put-back-risk, and every time I see the phrase put-back-risk I wonder . . . whatever happened to “buyer beware” and I wonder, did Fannie and Freddie abandoned due-diligence in their processes while attempting to buy as many loans as they could buy in order to hit their mandated executive bonus targets?
RE: Put-Back-Risk
In the late 1990's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created automated underwriting systems. Fannie and Freddie encouraged mortgage originators to use their automated systems as “conduits” for underwriting and submitting loans to be purchased by Fannie and Freddie. If mortgage originators were using automated underwriting systems developed by the purchasers (Fannie and Freddie) why didn't the systems detect the poorly underwritten loans? Were there no audit procedures in place for ongoing audit and quality testing of the loans the GSEs were buying? I'd like to see an examination of the effect of the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie and Freddie.
In the mid to late 1990’s The GSE's also created the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) which is a mess because it lacked supervisory controls and audit controls on in-puts (mortgage records) which were supposed to record land title changes and supposed to record changes in mortgage note ownership.
Below, I’ve hyperlinked a couple of interesting articles which discuss important historical information about the competitive environment in the mortgage industry.
For more on this subject, see: Why Big Lenders Are So Afraid Of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” By Patrick Barta - Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal – pub. April 5, 2001, at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB986417586751445153.html?cb=logged0.6522271920004229
And, Is FM Watch a Crusader With an Agenda? By Louis Sichelman – RealtyTimes, pub. 7/5/1999 at: http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/19990705_fmwatch.htm
