Mortgage Market Due for Overhaul.

A year after passage of the Dodd-Frank act, the $10.5 trillion American mortgage market remains in limbo. One big reason is that the law scarcely touches Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration -- the government-run lenders that dominate the home loan market. The consequences of lax mortgage lending were central to the crisis that Dodd-Frank was intended to make unrepeatable. But rather than tackle the huge and highly political issue of Fannie, Freddie and the F.H.A., the law narrowly focused on one part of the market. That's the private-label mortgage-backed securities area, source of more than $3 trillion of mortgage bonds from 2002 to 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]