A switch from the London Inter-bank Offered Rate to a different reference rate won’t have a major impact on the commercial MBS market, according to analysts at Morningstar Credit Ratings.

Defaults remain low on student loan refinancing originated by online lenders due to the overall high quality of their borrowers, and some new repayment assistance programs will help the strong performance, said Moody’s Investors Service.

Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay more than $15 million to resolve allegations that its traders misled investors into overpaying for residential MBS. In other legal stories, a monoline insurer sued a trustee over the settlement amount in an RMBS repurchase case while another group of MBS trustees defeated a class-certification motion in California state court.

The possibility of issuer failure is a continuing concern at Ginnie Mae…

Mortgage lenders started diverting high-balance GSE-eligible loans into non-agency MBS last year…

The new ruling raises the likelihood that the Supreme Court might take up the issue in the future.

“We didn’t observe any meaningful change in purchase loan application trends compared to earlier years,” said Archana Pradhan of CoreLogic.

One former loanDepot official had this to say about the rumor: “It makes sense. loanDepot has plenty of loan officers handling inbound leads. Amazon could create a ton more and compete with Quicken….”

Secondary mortgage market activity cooled dramatically in the first quarter of 2018, according to bank call report data analyzed by Inside Mortgage Trends. [Includes one data chart.]

Mortgage banking operations generally lost money on loan production during the first quarter of 2018 but managed to more than make it up with positive servicing results, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association quarterly performance report.