Mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates shrunk in the fourth quarter of 2018, helped by tight underwriting standards along with a strong economy and home price trends. [Includes one data chart.]

Warehouse lenders ended the year with $64.0 billion of commitments on their books, a modest 1.4% sequential decline and flat compared to the same period a year ago, according to survey figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance. [Includes one data chart.]

The one bright spot in the residential mortgage market last year was purchase-mortgage lending, which provided at least a faint glow in an otherwise dreary year for lenders. [Includes four data charts.]

The average daily trading volume in agency MBS spiked northward in January, increasing 18.3% on a sequential basis, according to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Even though Mark Calabria backtracked on a decade of controversial comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at his confirmation hearing last week, his nomination to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency came out of the Senate Banking Committee with a 13 to 12, strictly party-line vote.

The industry is considering adopting block-chain technology in structured finance for its purported advantages, but S&P Global Ratings has expressed concerns that the nascent nature of the technology may introduce new risks to securitizations.

Comprehensive housing-finance reform probably isn’t in the cards anytime soon, but a plan to overhaul the GSEs is, according to industry participants. It remains unclear, though, what changes will be accomplished and whether Congress will pass legislation or if the reforms will be completed via the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury Department.

In his semi-annual testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally put a number to his talk of “normalizing” the central bank’s balance sheet. He described a balance of $1 trillion as “a reasonable starting point, an estimate of where we might end up.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency late this week issued a final rule aimed at improving liquidity of the to-be-announced MBS as well as the new uniform MBS, which makes its debut in early June.

If you’re wondering about the strength of the MBS and ABS markets these days, consider this: More than 8,000 people attended the SFIG Vegas conference this week, a record for the event, according to officials at the Structured Finance Industry Group.