Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae’s biggest buyer of non-performing loans

Since 2015, the bank has purchased over $5.7 billion in unpaid loan balances

Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae’s biggest buyer of non-performing loans
Goldman Sachs snapped up nearly 8,000 non-performing loans from Fannie Mae Tuesday, amounting to $1.4 billion in unpaid balances. The purchase makes the bank the largest buyer of delinquent Fannie Mae loans over the past year and half, according to The Wall Street Journal.

To date, the investment bank has amassed almost two-thirds of the $9.6 billion in loans Fannie Mae has auctioned, spending approximately $4.5 billion on around 26,000 loans. 

Goldman Sachs has purchased 59% of Fannie Mae-auctioned NPLs since it started selling in 2015 – a total of $5.7 billion in unpaid loan balances. It also dominated in the past two auctions in October and February, garnering a total of 15,000 loans worth $2.8 billion in unpaid balances.

“Buying non-performing loans and modifying them is a profitable business,” Laurie Goodman of the Housing Finance Policy Center at Urban Institute told the Journal.

The bank went back into the mortgage loan market after selling its mortgage-servicer in 2011. Goldman aimed at lessening its payments to the government through restructuring loans by lowering its interest rates, prolonging the loan or by debt-forgiveness.

Since the early 1990s, Goldman Sachs has been using its Dallas-based subsidiary MTGLQ Investors LP to trade credit. Short for “mortgage liquidation,” the bank has also been using MTGLQ to purchase Fannie Mae NPLs.


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