“To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the (FOMC) decided to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion.  Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.  The Federal Reserve has launched the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to facilitate the extension of credit to households and small businesses and anticipates that the range of eligible collateral for this facility is likely to be expanded to include other financial assets.”

Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee roughly 31 million mortgages, or about $5.5 trillion in loans, which is more than half of all U.S home mortgages. That news did the trick, prices shot through the roof, and suddenly Lock Desks and investors are dreading the attempted renegotiations and potential pull-through problems ahead of them.

Do you want to see if your loan, or your neighbor’s loan, is owned by Fannie? https://loanlookup.fanniemae.com/loanlookup/
Do you want to see if your loan, or your neighbor’s loan, is owned by Fannie’s brother? https://ww3.freddiemac.com/corporate/

Today the market is grappling with the big move in Treasury securities yesterday. They will be announcing the details of next week’s 2-yr, 5-yr, and 7-yr auction ($100 billion is anticipated). We have already seen Initial Jobless Claims fall to 646,000 in the week ended March 14, although the previous week’s number was revised up to 658,000 from 654,000. The number of people staying on the benefits roll, however, after drawing an initial week of aid was up 185,000 to 5.47 million in the week ended March 7, the latest week for which the data is available, from 5.29 million the previous week. This was the highest on record and pushed the insured unemployment rate to 4.1 percent from 3.9 percent the week before, the highest since June 1983. And the four-week moving average for new claims rose to 654,750, the highest since October 1982.