The Changing Fortunes of FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund and the Legislative Response

The 1980s was a bad decade for FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance (MMI) program, the mainstay of FHA's single family mortgage insurance. While the MMI Fund is required by statute to be actuarially sound, the Fund lost close to $6 billion dollars, and its economic value declined from 5.3 percent of insurance-in-force to under one percent. This study documents the decline in the soundness of the MMI Fund in the 1980s and describes the legislation enacted in October 1990 to shore up the Fund.