China’s residential mortgage-backed securities industry, which is younger and smaller than the U.S. RMBS market, has grown rapidly over the last few years, according to a new report from Moody’s Investor Service. Spurred by a growing mortgage market, China securitized an estimated $87 billion of residential loans in 2018. Though modest compared to the U.S. annual production, it was a record year for China, having tripled from the previous year’s total issuance and even surpassing ...

The Department of Labor in March proposed a new threshold for overtime eligibility. The proposal leaves untouched standards that have been in place since 2010, which make mortgage loan officers eligible for overtime pay. Currently, certain employees that make at least $455 per week ($23,600 per year) are exempt from overtime pay, which is paid at 1.5 times the employee’s regular rate of pay when working more than 40 hours a week. The DOL proposed increasing the overtime ...

More states are joining the chorus of calls to enforce consumer laws more rigorously, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shows signs of reducing its oversight responsibility. So far, at least four states have created state watchdog agencies akin to the CFPB. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office in July 2017 established a consumer financial protection unit, which focuses on mortgage issues, debt collection, payday lending and auto financing. Roughly 15 of its 25 attorneys ...

Private mortgage insurers could have excess capital of nearly $2 billion by the end of 2019, analysts predict. A recent report from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods suggests the combination of private mortgage insurers’ high returns on equity and increasing use of reinsurance through insurance-linked note deals is creating the largesse. All of the nation’s six active MIs are publicly traded or are owned by a parent company that is. From 2016 through 2018, private MI’s insurance-in-force grew at ...

Ocwen Financial, the nation’s 12th largest servicer, has reached a civil settlement with the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, to resolve a complaint filed by the state in 2017. As part of the agreement, Ocwen will make a $675,000 payment and provide relief to residential borrowers. The Massachusetts AG said the settlement involves total restitution of $2 million. The AG alleged that Ocwen committed “widespread mortgage servicing violations that increased Massachusetts ...

Ginnie Mae securitized $31.39 billion of FHA single-family purchase loans during the first quarter of 2019, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities disclosures. Although that represented an 18.4% drop from the previous quarter, the FHA share of agency purchase loans edged up to 30.8% in early 2019 as other insurance programs saw larger declines. Private mortgage insurance remained ... [Includes one data chart.]

The fourth quarter of 2018 was one of the hardest times in recent memory for companies to generate a profit from their mortgage banking operations. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that only 44.0% of participants in its quarterly performance survey managed to report positive pre-tax net income for the final three months of last year. This appears to be the lowest share of firms producing positive results in many years, lower than the 54.2% share back in the first quarter of 2014 ...

The wholesale-broker channel appears to be gaining ground in the tightly competitive primary market in agency conforming mortgages. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals that broker originations accounted for 12.5% of single-family loans pooled in agency mortgage-backed securities during the first quarter of 2019. That represented a substantial leap of 1.3 percentage points from the broker share of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae ... [Includes two data charts.]

A class-action lawsuit filed last month in the Southern District of New York accusing the largest authorized dealers in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt bonds of engaging in a systematic price-fixing scheme just got a little more interesting.

In October, the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco reached a $3.6 million settlement with two former executives in its Washington, DC, office of legislative and regulatory affairs who claimed they were the victims of racial discrimination. There’s just one problem: Despite apparently reaching an agreement during mediation, the bank didn’t pay up.