In the new SEC filing, PHH notes: “Merrill Lynch originations will contribute approximately $45 million of pre-tax earnings for fiscal year 2016 based on the company’s estimate of Merrill Lynch loan closing volume for 2016.”
Further empirical confirmation of a recovering mortgage market continued to accumulate at the CFPB during the third quarter, as related consumer complaints dropped 19.8 percent, according to a new analysis by Inside the CFPB. For the first nine months of 2016, consumer gripes about their mortgages fell 8.4 percent compared to the same time period the year before. Criticisms about mortgage servicing fell 21.8 percent quarter-over-quarter and 2.0 percent year-over-year, the data show....
Two academics assert in a new white paper that the Dodd-Frank Act mortgage rules promulgated by the CFPB that were designed to protect consumers actually harmed middle-class borrowers and benefitted the wealthy. “Dodd-Frank aimed at reducing mortgage fees and abuses against vulnerable borrowers, but increased the costs of originating mortgages,” said University of Maryland professors Francesco D’Acunto and Alberto Rossi in their new paper. “We find it triggered a substantial redistribution of credit from middle-class households to wealthy households.” A back-of-the-envelope calculation that keeps constant the mortgage demand characteristics of 2010 shows financial institutions reduced their production of medium-sized loans by 15 percent in 2014, and increased making large loans by 21 percent, they said. D’Acunto and Rossi also found ...
“We hope that you will help us to push back on current efforts to gift the proprietary infrastructure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the big banks,” the clergymen write.
As recently as three years ago, few companies were willing to finance originations of nonprime mortgages, either via warehouse funding or acquiring the paper as whole loans. Daniel Perl, CEO of Citadel Servicing, said there are currently a number of Wall Street companies and other firms that will provide a certain amount of liquidity for one to three years, while demand for whole loans and MBS is also increasing. “There’s a lot to be said for this market today that you couldn’t say three years ago,” he said earlier this month during a webinar hosted by Inside Mortgage Finance. Tom Hutchens, a senior vice president of sales and marketing at Angel Oak Mortgage Solutions, said...