“The [jumbo] market is much bigger than the banks’ balance sheets,” according to Randy Robertson, a managing director and co-head of securitized products at BlackRock. The firm’s jumbo mortgage real-estate investment trust has been operating for four months and aims to help re-establish the...

A bill that would create a legislative framework for a covered bond market in the U.S. cleared a House subcommittee with bipartisan support this week following some fine tuning by its sponsors to address concerns raised by critics and regulators. The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and...

Securitization markets would gain more certainty regarding securities issuance going forward under legislation passed out of a House subcommittee this week that would restore to credit rating agencies their previous exemption from expert liability under the Securities Act of 1933. The exemption was removed with...

The Treasury Market Practices Group wants to improve efficiency in the agency MBS market by imposing charges for failure to complete transactions. “The TMPG is proposing fails charges in the agency debt and agency MBS markets in order to reduce the incidence of delivery failures in the market,” said Tom Wipf, chair of...

The city of Los Angeles on Wednesday filed a civil lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and its subsidiaries for failing to maintain the properties of loans that were pooled in non-agency MBS for which the company served as trustee. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich filed the over 200-page complaint, which accused the bank of...

Several of the top mortgage servicers in the industry reported ongoing shrinkage in their portfolios during the first quarter of 2011, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking. As a group, the top five servicers reported a 1.1 percent drop in their combined servicing operations from... [Includes one data chart]

One of the emerging compliance priorities for mortgage lenders will be to synchronize as much as possible their adoption of separate rules for “qualified mortgages” and “qualified residential mortgages” developed by federal regulators following the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Adding to the challenge is...

Mortgage origination activity dropped sharply in early 2011 and momentum is pointing toward further declines as the housing market limps into a new buying season. Mortgage lenders generated an estimated $325.0 billion in single-family originations during the first three months of the year, a decline of... [Includes two data charts]

The American Guild of Appraisers met with Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, on April 14 to ask for his help in resolving the guild’s concerns with the Federal Reserve Board’s interim final rule on appraiser independence and reasonable and customary fees, which was implemented on the first of the month...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development clearly spelled out that lenders must be discrete in their use of the FHA “Approved Lending Institution” insignia and defined other specific regulations relating to logo use in a letter to lenders this week. Improper use of HUD or FHA logos can result...