Mortgage lenders large and small have indicated they plan to stay away from making mortgages that do not fit into either the “safe harbor” or the “rebuttable presumption” QM boxes.

The latest risk-sharing transaction from Fannie Mae references a $29.31 billion pool of mortgages.

According to the bank’s fourth quarter earnings statement, 68 percent of its originations were refis – the mirror image of Wells Fargo, which had 68 percent of its production in purchase-money loans.

Talk about red hot! Sales of Ginnie Mae mortgage servicing rights soared in fiscal 2013, Inside Mortgage Finance has learned.

The FHFA IG audit estimates that some 9.5 percent of claims for pre-foreclosure property inspections in 2011 and 2012 resulted in $5 million of overpayments by Fannie Mae.

It may be time for the mortgage industry to take a chill-pill: applications are on the rise again, rates have stabilized and some firms are actually hiring loan officers.

Meanwhile, Ginnie Mae securities posted a pocket-sized increase within the Federal Home Loan Bank system during the period ending Sept. 30, 2013.

Waiting for a revival in jumbo MBS issuance is like waiting for Godot.

On a sequential basis, the origination results look slightly better: a 38 percent decline compared to the third quarter of 2013 for Wells and a 42 percent downdraft for JPM. Both have laid off thousands of mortgage workers over the few quarters.

The GSEs' largesse is gaining new attention in Washington with the news that the two helped the U.S. government post a budget surplus of $53 billion in December.