The non-agency MBS market is off to what looks like one of its best years in terms of new issuance since the financial crisis, according to a new analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. A total of $15.30 billion of non-agency MBS were issued in the second quarter, representing a gain of 13.4 percent from the first three months of 2017. That brought year-to-date production to $28.80 billion, a 32.0 percent increase over the first half of 2016. As has been the case since 2009, most of the new production has been...[Includes three data tables]
Federal Housing Finance Agency lawsuits over pre-crisis non-agency MBS are winding down with one of the last holdouts, Royal Bank of Scotland, reaching a settlement this week for $5.5 billion. In 2011, the agency filed charges against 18 issuers and underwriters alleging securities law violations and fraud regarding non-agency MBS sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. JP Morgan Chase settled for $4.0 billion, Deutsche Bank for $1.9 billion and Goldman Sachs for $1.2 billion. Most of the cases were settled in 2013 and 2014. The two government-sponsored enterprises purchased...
The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee is moving closer to beginning what is likely to be a long and drawn-out process to gradually and predictably unwind the U.S. central bank’s huge portfolio of agency MBS and debt – the sooner, the better, according to Fed chief Janet Yellen. “The FOMC intends to gradually reduce the Federal Reserve’s securities holdings by decreasing its reinvestment of the principal payments it receives from the securities held in the System Open Market Account,” she said this week in her semi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony on monetary policy to members of Congress. “Specifically, such payments will be reinvested...
The average daily trading volume of agency MBS reached $209.9 billion in June, the second highest reading of the year and a sign that liquidity is picking up, according to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The increase in trading comes despite the fact that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a total of $317.7 billion of new MBS in the second quarter, a 6.1 percent decline from the first quarter. For the six-month period, 2017 holds the edge with volume up 3.5 percent. But it hasn’t been...
As talks intensify on how to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of limbo, smaller lenders are clamoring to make sure they have a say in how housing-finance reform plays out. Nearly all sides agree that small lenders should continue to have access to the secondary market; how that’s accomplished is a different matter. The Main Street GSE Reform Coalition – an umbrella group made up of small-lender and community-advocacy groups – wants the government-sponsored enterprises to begin rebuilding capital buffers by suspending their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. It also wants...
The proposal to restructure the credit-risk transfer debt-note programs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make them more attractive to real estate investment trusts likely won’t have a negative impact on the credit risk and quality of those deals, Morningstar said in a new report. The proposed changes to Fannie’s Connecticut Avenue Securities and Freddie’s Structured Agency Credit Risk programs would characterize them as real estate mortgage investment conduits. This would allow REITs and some overseas investors to participate more broadly in the programs. Currently, the structure of the government-sponsored enterprises’ popular CRT programs doesn’t meet...
According to Fairholme’s math, the GSEs earn over $15 billion a year, and taxpayers own 80 percent of the companies (via the senior preferred). Berkowitz values the senior stock at $100 billion…
With refinance activity tapering off, the retail production channel lost some of its edge during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities. Retail production accounted for 50.6 percent of the $290.63 billion of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae in the second quarter. Including modified loans and those with no channel identification ... [Includes one data chart]
Mortgage firms of all types continued to add to their payrolls late this spring, with many firms reporting they’re searching for technology workers. Overall, nonbank lender/servicers added 1,400 full-time positions in May, bringing total sector employment to 242,900 positions, the best reading since December 2007, according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Separately, loan brokerage companies also added 1,400 jobs during the month, bringing their employment ...
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