Will Congress eventually final a legislative solution to all the GSE shareholder lawsuits that have been filed?

MSR sales, in general, are expected to be brisk in the first quarter as lenders sell receivables to make up for declining originations.

The megabanks no longer have a total "lock" on the MBS issuance market. But is this trend short-lived?

It is not a matter of “if” or even “when” but rather “how” the remaining defendants settle lawsuits filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency over billions in non-agency MBS sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the housing crisis. Last week, the FHFA announced it recovered $7.88 billion in civil settlements in 2013 from seven of the 18 defendants the agency took to court in 2011. Eleven firms have yet to settle, with Bank of America facing the largest exposure because of its ownership of Countrywide Financial Corp. and Merrill Lynch, two of the largest issuers in the now-defunct subprime MBS market. In its original claim, the conservator of Fannie and Freddie accused...[Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities remained the preferred investment choice of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks during the third quarter of 2013, with a modest increase from the previous quarter, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside The GSEs based on data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Meanwhile, Ginnie Mae securities posted a pocket-sized increase within the FHLBank system during the period ending Sept. 30, 2013.

Declining refinance volume contributed to a marked decline in the GSEs’ overall business at the end of 2013 as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac posted big declines in business on a quarterly and total 12-month basis, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $182.2 billion in new single-family mortgage-backed securities during the three-month period ending Dec. 31, 2013, a two-year low.

Commercial banks and savings institutions coughed up $1.998 billion in mortgage repurchases and indemnifications during the third quarter of 2013, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. It was the lowest quarterly repurchase total for the industry since the third quarter of 2008, when the buyback storm was just beginning to gather force. The third quarter 2013 total also reflected a 25.2 percent drop from the second quarter. For the first nine months of 2013 ... [Includes one data chart]

The tendency of borrowers with low credit scores to choose adjustable-rate mortgages over fixed-rate loans is more about economic considerations rather than a lack of financial sophistication, according to a study by Federal Reserve researchers. In the study, Fred Furlong, David Lang and Yelena Takhtamanova looked at factors that influenced lower-credit borrowers to select ARMs over fixed-rate mortgages during the housing boom in early 2000. In general, the research team observed ...

After years of operating in an environment with exceptionally low interest rates, federal regulators are warning lenders of risks as interest rates are expected to rise in 2014. Regulators are particularly concerned about lenders’ exposure to longer-term assets such as mortgages and agency mortgage-backed securities. “The recent increase in long-term interest rates underscores the need to understand and quantify bank vulnerability to rising interest rates,” the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ...

A white paper circulated last week at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association asserted, somewhat counter-intuitively, that repealing the home-mortgage interest deduction and property-tax reductions would result in lower home prices but higher rates of homeownership. The paper, prepared by Kamila Sommer, an economist with the Federal Reserve Board, and Paul Sullivan, an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, studied the impact of reducing housing tax expenditures on equilibrium ...