The U.S. Treasury Department held its conference on the future of housing finance this morning. Among the speakers at the gathering were U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and PIMCO founder Bill Gross.
Despite the buildup leading into the gathering, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts called it a non-event for the mortgage-backed market.
"Other than cooling some of the overheated sentiment that has developed in recent weeks, the event was essentially a non-event for today’s MBS market," analysts wrote.
They added that a “force majeure” refinancing is an unlikely result of this process and suggested for investors to purchase FNMA 5.5 fly as a means of taking advantage of overblown fears going into this conference.
"The opening panels provided opportunity for high quality input from a broad array
of stakeholders and participants in the US housing and housing finance markets," said analysts, adding that the challenges of the reform process were made abundantly clear.
Housing finance, according to analysts, is critical to the U.S. economy on various levels.
Futhermore, they said that developing new policies that respond to the flaws revealed by the housing market downturn while preserving the positives will be an, "extraordinarily complex undertaking."
"This necessitates a slow and deliberate reform process," they said.
For more coverage on the event, click this
