&PTop rating agencies continue to have different requirements for issuers to obtain the most favorable ratings on certain transactions, including the all-important criterion of credit enhancement. The latest manifestation of this dynamic involved a recent $1.45 billion servicer advance receivable transaction by American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., a deal that passed muster with DBRS and Standard & Poor’s. But AHMS withdrew the deal from consideration at Fitch Ratings because of that company’s more conservative rating criteria. DBRS and S gave most components of the transaction a triple-A rating. That included two $325 million senior term notes and a $600 million senior variable funding note. The deal included subordinate term notes of $150 million and $50 million. The primary assets of...

The battle over the Dodd-Frank-mandated risk-retention rules continues on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers rehashing concerns about either the detrimental or beneficial effects the proposed rule may have on the market. The Dodd-Frank Act required federal regulators to come up with a definition of “qualified residential mortgages” that would be exempt from a 5 percent risk-retention requirement when securitized. During a hearing this week in the House Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs, Republican lawmakers argued that transparency is a better solution to restoring investor confidence and reviving the non-agency MBS market. But according to Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-MD, lenders shouldn’t be let off the hook, and the risk-retention rules do furnish necessary...

Government Accountability Office: Foreclosure report: The GAO released a report last week entitled Mortgage Foreclosures: Documentation Problems Reveal Need for Ongoing Regulatory Oversight, which was compiled as a result of a probe House Democrats requested...

Between the servicing alignment initiative recently announced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the consent decrees bank regulators struck with some top mortgage servicers last month, and possible national servicing standards from federal policymakers in the near future, there may be very little room left for state attorneys general and regulators to influence servicing practices going forward...

One of the most critical factors contributing to the foreclosure documentation debacle was a fundamental failure on the part of many of the nation’s top mortgage servicers to truly manage their foreclosure networks, and that’s one of the deficiencies federal bank regulators are trying to remedy in their recent consent orders, industry experts have concluded...

The mortgage servicing industry is going to have its hands full and then some as it faces multiple levels of regulatory and statutory requirements over its practices, raising the question of exactly how all of these mandates and protocols are going to interact and how servicers are going to interface with them...

The mortgage banking industry is concerned that the Federal Reserve’s proposed rule on escrow accounts for higher-priced mortgage loans – especially the vast expansion of escrow account disclosure – is duplicative, unduly burdensome, and may be superseded shortly after it is implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

Some Congressional Republicans are making it increasingly clear that much of their concern with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has to do with the person currently overseeing its startup at the behest of President Obama, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren...

The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week announced they had filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and its wholly owned subsidiary, MortgageIT, over some of its FHA lending practices...

Much of the mortgage industry remains abuzz with talk about the new proposed regulatory rules that would spell out what constitutes a “qualified mortgage” or “qualified residential mortgage.”...