by Calculated Risk on 12/05/2009 09:09:00 PM

From the WSJ: Soured Loans Put Lenders on the Hook

As home loans sour at a rapid clip, mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are aggressively bouncing back defectively underwritten loans to lenders. The result: higher loan-loss reserves for the lenders and new headwind for banks trying to escape the housing downturn.

For lenders such as Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., which are among the largest sellers of mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, this could mean buying back souring loans at a loss.
...
Through Sept. 30, Freddie Mac put back about $2.7 billion of single-family mortgages to lenders, more than double the $1.2 billion of a year earlier.
...
In 2008, Fannie Mae bounced back roughly a quarter of the loans on 94,652 real-estate owned properties, or REOs, properties that have been reclaimed by Fannie after foreclosure. Through Sept. 30, Fannie Mae REO properties totaled 98,428. Many of these loans are plain-vanilla prime 30-year fixed-rate mortgages ...

It is a small number, but it is a start. These are mostly prime loans too - most of the subprime and Alt-A loans were securitized by Wall Street, not the GSEs.