FHFA Lawsuit Tally Approaches $8 billion

By: Jann Swanson • Thu, Jan 2 2014, 12:29 PM

In 2011, The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced lawsuits against 18 financial institutions for securities violations and/or fraud relating to the sale of Mortgage-Backed Securities to Fannie and Freddie between 2005 and 2007. Today's announcement is simply an update, stating the recovery amount is now "nearly $8 billion," though the agency took the opportunity to refresh our memories of the 2011 announcement.

The 2011 PDF referenced today by FHFA is essentially just a list of the entities involved. They include:

1.      Ally Financial Inc. f/k/a GMAC, LLC
2.      Bank of America Corporation
3.      Barclays Bank PLC
4.      Citigroup, Inc.
5.      Countrywide Financial Corporation
6.      Credit Suisse Holdings (USA), Inc.
7.      Deutsche Bank AG
8.      First Horizon National Corporation
9.      General Electric Company
10.    Goldman Sachs & Co.
11.    HSBC North America Holdings, Inc.
12.    JPMorgan Chase & Co.
13.    Merrill Lynch & Co. / First Franklin Financial Corp.
14.    Morgan Stanley
15.    Nomura Holding America Inc.
16.    The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC
17.    Société Générale
18.    UBS

Mortgage News Daily's original coverage goes into greater detail on that announcement, even digging in to some of the more eye-opening "actual vs claimed" statistics on loan features such as LTV. Certain tranches of MBS were represented as having ZERO loans with LTVs over 100 percent whereas the actual review showed it was more than 20 percent of the loans in some cases. Again, this info is all old news, but since FHFA is calling your attention to the superficial list, here's the original deeper dive: