Fannie Mae's first-quarter profits were enough for it to rebuild its minimum capital buffer and pay the Treasury Department dividend after being forced to take a draw during the previous fiscal period.
The Treasury secretary has said that he doesn't see changes to the housing finance system happening this year, but he's hopeful something can be done after the elections.
The Treasury secretary said reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will come into focus more in 2019, when Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt’s term will end.
The senior official said U.S. regulatory agencies should not rush to complete certain final aspects of Basel III, to prevent the new standards from conflicting with existing rules.
The rules to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act have become "formulaic and ossified" and must be changed to encourage lending practices the law originally intended to foster, the Fed's top regulator said.
The Treasury Department’s long-awaited report on modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act was heavy on glittering generalities but light on specifics, which explains why the report punted the real job of making needed reforms.
Critics argue that Community Reinvestment Act standards need to be more transparent, but creating more objective measures would require regulators to favor some types of loans over others.
The Treasury secretary has suggested raising an asset cutoff used by the Financial Stability Oversight Council to assess systemically significant nonbanks, removing some hedge funds and other risky firms from the council's purview.
