House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank says he will be recommending Congress close the doors on the government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuild the nation's housing finance system from ground zero. According to Frank, who has long been one of the GSEs' biggest proponents on Capitol Hill, the two firms cannot continue in their current form and his committee plans to propose killing off the enterprises completely rather than taking a "piecemeal" approach to their restructuring.
Following a surge in sales from September through November, existing-home sales fell 16.7 percent in December 2009, according to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The longer-term results, though, demonstrated the ongoing momentum in sales activity throughout the year. For all of 2009, there were 5,156,000 completed sales of previously owned homes, a 4.9 percent jump from the annual sales recorded in 2008. This is the first annual sales gain since 2005, NAR said.
Real estate developer Tishman Speyer and money manager BlackRock, Inc. said Monday that they are returning the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village complexes to creditors. The decision comes just weeks after Tishman Speyer and BlackRock withheld their $16.1 million payment from debt holders in an attempt to force the special servicer to restructure the loans.
The number of regional bank closures has already begun to pick up speed. Regulators have shuttered five more community-based financial institutions - in Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. The FDIC is making moves that indicate it expects another year of elevated bank closings. The agency is opening a satellite office in suburban Chicago to help manage receiverships and liquidate assets from failed institutions in the Midwest, similar to offices it has already set up in California and Florida.
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