Preparing the Foundation for a New, Stronger Housing Finance System
Our goal is to energize the rebuilding of the secondary mortgage market so that market participants may again compete with each other to ensure an efficient flow of credit for housing, confident in the knowledge of the risk involved and the rules in place. Making progress on essential infrastructure development, improving standardization, and generating meaningful discussion about rebuilding our housing finance infrastructure should help policymakers tackle critical questions about the government’s role in housing finance.
That foundation includes important efforts related to improvements to the Representation and Warranty Framework, foreclosure prevention efforts, structures for sharing risk with the private sector, the development of the Common Securitization Platform, and data standards.
The 2014 Strategic Plan provides an updated vision for FHFA’s implementation of its obligations as conservator of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
FHFA has issued two prior documents detailing the agency’s approach to the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On February 2, 2010, FHFA sent a letter to Congress outlining the agency’s understanding of its conservatorship obligations and how it planned to fulfill those obligations.
On February 21, 2012, FHFA sent Congress a “Strategic Plan for Enterprise Conservatorships: The Next Chapter in a Story that Needs an Ending” that set three strategic goals for conservatorship and elaborated on how FHFA planned to meet its conservatorship obligations.
FHFA’s 2014 Strategic Plan reflects this assessment and, as a result, three reformulated strategic goals are set forth here:
- MAINTAIN, in a safe and sound manner, foreclosure prevention activities and credit availability for new and refinanced mortgages to foster liquid, efficient, competitive and resilient national housing finance markets.
- REDUCE taxpayer risk through increasing the role of private capital in the mortgage market.
- BUILD a new single-family securitization infrastructure for use by the Enterprises and adaptable for use by other participants in the secondary market in the future.
These reformulated strategic goals take into account two major factors.
First, both the February 2, 2010 letter to Congress and the February 21, 2012 Strategic Plan heavily reflected that the Enterprises were generating losses with a highly uncertain outlook for future losses and that actions were necessary to stabilize the Enterprises.
Second, FHFA’s statutory responsibilities as conservator do not involve making policy decisions on the future of housing finance reform. That future will be decided by Congress. Consequently, FHFA’s 2014 Strategic Plan adheres to its existing statutory mandate of overseeing the conservatorships of the Enterprises in their current state and ensuring that the Enterprises’ infrastructure meets the needs of their current credit guarantee businesses and other operations.
Securitization Infrastructure
In October 2012, FHFA released a white paper, Building a New Infrastructure for the Secondary Mortgage Market, proposing a framework for a common securitization platform and an improved contractual and disclosure framework and requested public input. The white paper sought to identify the core components (proposed as data validation, issuance, disclosure, bond administration, and master servicing) of mortgage securitization that will be needed in the housing finance system in the future.
Along with the white paper, FHFA joined Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises) in outreach to a full range of stakeholders, including a variety of industry participants—small and large companies, trade groups, advocacy organizations, vendors, originators, servicers, investors, and mortgage insurers, among others. We are working with the Enterprises to use the feedback gathered on the securitization platform prototype, to align key contract features and practices, and address additional protections investors require. This effort will take several years.