New legislation introduced in both the House and the Senate would impose tough national mortgage servicing standards, with plenty of sticks and barely a single carrot. Early last week, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-OR, and Olympia Snowe, R-ME, introduced the Regulation of Mortgage Servicing Act to help homeowners stay in their homes by making the rules for mortgage servicers "more fair and transparent." The bill would require mortgage servicers to create a single point of contact for borrowers, end dual-track processing of foreclosures while homeowners are negotiating a modification, and provide an independent, third-party review before sending a family into...

All the witnesses at a hearing late last week in the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development agreed that national mortgage servicing standards are a necessity, but they acknowledged that the trick is deciding what they will cover and how they will work in an environment ridden with competing problems. "Servicers do not believe that the rules that apply to everyone else apply to them," said Diane Thompson, counsel at the National Consumer Law Center. "This lawless attitude, supported by financial incentives and too-often tolerated by regulators, is the root cause of the failure of...

A proposed bipartisan bill that would dissolve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but retain an explicit government guarantee for certain mortgage-backed securities is either dangerously unfeasible or it's a measured way to preserve the government's role in housing finance, along with the 30-year mortgage, according to industry observers. Filed last late week, H.R. 1859, the Housing Finance Reform Act of 2011, would phase out the government-sponsored enterprises within five years and replace them with privately capitalized entities authorized to issue MBS that carry a government guarantee. The bill would empower the Federal Housing Finance Agency to issue...

Correspondent lending has taken a chunk of market share away from the broker channel, and smaller banks are jumping at the opportunity to become correspondent lenders to fill the spaces that too-big-to-fail lenders have overlooked or ignored. NexBank is among those trying to fill the gap. The North Texas state savings bank has announced a new wholesale correspondent channel aimed at offering mortgage brokers a chance to serve as mortgage bankers to their customers. NexBank is also looking to partner with community banks that have the balance sheet or warehouse line to fund loans but do not have the ability or desire to underwrite the loans. As a partner...

Two California members of the House, one Republican, one Democrat, have introduced a bill to extend indefinitely high-cost loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA due to expire this fall.

A federal appeals court last week upheld a lower court ruling that shareholders of Freddie Mac cannot sue the former directors and officers of the GSE for losses following the government takeover of Freddie by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mortgage servicers should already be in the process of preparing to implement Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's soon-to-be unveiled servicing requirements as the two GSEs work to roll out new rules in the coming weeks.

Lawmakers on a House subcommittee last week approved by a wide bipartisan margin a bill that would create a legislative framework for a covered bond market in the U.S. and, some critics contend, an unnecessary competitor to the Federal Home Loan Bank system.

Government housing policy and agencies played a much larger role in the housing crisis than initially believed, but a fresh look at the conclusions of two GSE critics has prompted a top JPMorgan Chase analyst to take the unusual step of issuing a public retraction.

Faced with a declining originations outlook, mortgage lenders should take advantage of today's more plentiful warehouse lending environment to review strategies that were developed during the liquidity crisis, industry experts say. The warehouse capacity issue has swung 180 degrees from where it was a few years ago, said Elaine Batlis, a senior vice president at Silvergate Bank, during last week's national secondary market conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Back in 2006-07, there was an oasis of liquidity; pricing was good and terms were flexible, Batlis said. But in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, there was a sudden...