"… making CMOs eligible for the "to-be-announced" market — where generic issues are bought and sold before the bonds are actually delivered to investors — would lay additional supply on the market …" [you can say that again ] Perhaps the golden age of financial engineering has not yet died. As reported by Reuters,[1] some bright light has seriously brought up the possibility of recycling Collatoralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) into the GSEs’ To-Be-Announced (TBA) market for MBS debt sales. TBA (see slides 56-57 here) is supposed to be for pristine prime mortgage paper so good that the debt buyer will…
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"While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as corporate entities may not be needed, their exclusive function as dedicated investors is needed to create and maintain the United States secondary mortgage market." When I started looking at Fannie Mae back around 2002 or 2003 it was usually described as America’s largest non-bank financial institution. Perhaps that’s true in some ways even now, but it and its sibling Freddie Mac are on life support under new regulator FHFA’s conservatorship. To get an idea how extreme things have gotten, consider that Fannie’s market cap is now a bit less than a quarter of…
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Here’s Peter Schiff yesterday on what he feels what having Obama as president means for the economy:  

Once more, an "unsinkable" North American housing market is taking on water.  Home prices in Vancouver B.C. have dropped 8.8% since May:   VANCOUVER — Housing prices have fallen 8.8 per cent in the Vancouver area since May, according to new figures from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. The overall residential benchmark price in the region in October was $518,668, the real estate board said in a release yesterday afternoon, down about $50,000 from $568,411 in May. It is the latest official assessment that has declared the boom in the real estate market in Vancouver and British Columbia…
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