The traditional interpretation of Section 8 of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act that the mortgage industry has relied on for decades was vindicated this week when ...

A total of $12.41 billion of non-agency MBS were issued during the third quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis, but the market continued to ...

ICYMI: The brouhaha over the Wells Fargo phony account creation debacle took another turn this week, with CEO John Stump opting for early retirement...

Further empirical confirmation of a recovering mortgage market continued to accumulate at the CFPB during the third quarter, as related consumer complaints dropped 19.8 percent ...

A total of $12.41 billion of non-agency MBS were issued during the third quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis, but the market continued to rely heavily on a mix of recycled collateral and niche transactions. Overall issuance was up 78.3 percent from the second quarter, including big gains in prime MBS production and re-securitization deals. That still left year-to-date issuance off 43.9 percent from the first nine months of 2015. The huge jump in prime MBS production is...[Includes three data tables]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sold $3.78 billion of credit-risk transfer bonds during the third quarter, a 7.8 percent increase from the previous period, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of CRT disclosures made by the two government-sponsored enterprises. That brought year-to-date issue in Fannie’s Connecticut Avenue Securities program and Freddie’s Structured Agency Credit Risk program to $10.73 billion, up 13.3 percent from the first nine months of last year. Fannie had...[Includes one data table]

The Structured Finance Industry Group is preparing to publish standards that aim to increase transparency for representations and warranties on new non-agency MBS, according to officials at the trade group. Eric Kaplan, a managing partner at Ranieri Strategies, said SFIG will release one or two “green papers” this year as part of the group’s RMBS 3.0 effort to revive issuance of non-agency MBS. Kaplan detailed the plans along with Daniel Goodwin, director of mortgage policy at SFIG, at the recent ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network. SFIG has released...

Financial institutions that are under scrutiny for questionable practices involving residential MBS can avoid a lot of grief and legal expenses if they cooperate early in the investigation, according to the Department of Justice’s chief overseer of civil litigation. In recent remarks at the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics’ annual conference in Chicago, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Bill Baer underscored the wisdom and benefits of early cooperation in a government RMBS inquiry. There would have been...

U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Margaret Sweeney’s ruling, released last week, raises new questions about the validity of government efforts to keep thousands of other documents secret in a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholder case over the net worth sweep imposed by the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to shareholder advocates. In Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al, shareholders argue that the net worth sweep of the government-sponsored enterprises’ profits is unfair, and they have scored significant victories in getting access to various written communications to prove their claim. The recent batch of documents Sweeney released to the plaintiff’s attorneys show...

Executive departures continue to plague due diligence provider Clayton Holdings and now there’s talk that its parent company, Radian Group, is contemplating taking a goodwill charge on a subsidiary it paid $305 million for two years ago. The latest top-level officials to leave the unit include Capital Markets Senior Managing Director Brian Wornow and Mark Hughes, executive vice president in charge of sales and marketing. Sources close to Wornow contend...