Whether President Trump is serious about replacing the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remains to be seen. But his enthusiasm over the prospect may have gotten the better of his legal judgement and in fact perhaps laid the foundation for such a replacement to be reversed, one noted legal scholar suggested recently. “If Trump is planning on attempting to remove CFPB Director Richard Cordray ‘for cause,’ he’s hardly going about it in a smart way,” Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, said in a recent online blog posting. “The Trump administration keeps generating more and more evidence that any for-cause removal would be purely pretextual, which strengthens Cordray’s hand were he to litigate the removal order (as he surely would).” To begin with, the reasons that are offered as justification for sacking Cordray – such as claims of employee discrimination at the bureau or the agency’s settlements with auto finance companies – refer...

Mortgage delinquencies in the fourth quarter of 2016 hit their highest level of the year, erasing declines from the previous quarter, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance Large Servicer Delinquency Index. The foreclosure rate continued to decline, hitting levels last seen in 2007. Among the servicers tracked by the index, the total mortgage delinquency rate was 5.05 percent as of the end of the fourth quarter. The rate was at 5.54 percent at the end of 2015 and declined each quarter until the most recent period. Each delinquency bucket increased...[Includes one data table]

A dozen or so private equity firms are taking a close look at investing in mortgage lending start-ups that claim they can originate and underwrite more cheaply than traditional players because of their cutting-edge technology. A handful of PE firms have already taken out their checkbooks, investing millions of dollars in lenders such as Better Mortgage and Nexera Holding LLC, which operates consumer-direct lender Newfi and a wholesaler called Bluestream. Roughly six months ago, Better received...

Despite some reports of credit access loosening, it’s harder to get a mortgage today than it was during the housing bubble, according to the Urban Institute. With borrowers being denied at a much higher rate than in the past, lower-credit mortgage applicants are dropping out of the housing market. As access to credit tightened after the financial crisis, many lower-credit applicants were discouraged from applying, the UI study noted. That led to a higher-credit applicant pool, which in turn led to a lower rejection rate. This caused...

The court also ordered that the three-judge panel’s ruling this past October be vacated. Oral arguments will be heard May 24...

Fed Chairman Janet Yellen on the future of Fannie and Freddie: “…I would hope that Congress would decide explicitly on what the government’s role is and if there are guarantees, that they would be recognized and priced appropriately.”

“Anytime you have rates run up by 50 basis points, it usually takes about 90 days before a washout begins,” said one mortgage advisor.

Walter Investment/Ditech has yet to establish a date for the release of its fourth quarter results…

It’s unclear at this point what the takeover might mean, if anything, for Nationstar, whose own share price has rallied the past few months.

Sponsors can generally meet the requirements by retaining the most subordinate tranches of the securitization equaling at least 5.0 percent of the deal…