The report, conducted by Alvarez & Marshall, was making the rounds in Washington Wednesday morning. John O’Neill, a managing director in the evaluation firm of Alvarez & Marsal, confirmed to IMFnews that his company conducted an evaluation on the GSEs for the Blackstone Group.

The GSEs held a total of $84.61 billion in nonprime MBS as of the end of 2013, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets.

Servicers would face annual government certifications and biennial examinations by the new regulator/insurance fund. Minimum operational and management standards would be created for internal controls, recordkeeping, audit systems, and reporting, to name just a few.

The Fed has promised to “taper” its MBS and Treasury investments in the months ahead, but with MBS issuance on the decline because of falling originations, the central bank likely will maintain or even increase its market share of purchases.

How does the Johnson-Crapo bill favor senior preferred shareholders? The language notes that when assets in Fannie and Freddie are eventually sold, the idea is to “maximize the return for the senior preferred share-holders of the enterprises”…

A Morgan Stanley managing director, Brian Wornow, recently departed as head of the firm’s trading desk, but he is hardly alone among Wall Street traders who are weighing their options amid rapidly declining MBS production. According to Wall Street executives and lenders that feed their trading desks, there are other concerns about lower-than-expected bonuses this spring and an unwillingness on the part of some established firms to take risks in the mortgage market, particularly when it comes to new jumbo mortgages and other non-agency vehicles. Sources contend...

The residential MBS issued in 2013 equaled 78.5 percent of primary market originations, the highest securitization rate since 2010, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. The mortgage securitization rate typically moves higher when primary-market originations are declining because of the time lag between loan closing and MBS issuance. Last year started with a bang – $560 billion in new originations – and ended with a whimper, $305 billion. In the conventional conforming market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS issuance – even after excluding loans that were more than three months old when they were securitized – represented...[Includes one data chart]

For those of you tracking the lawsuits filed by GSE preferred investors against the federal government, one attorney told us this week that: “These cases won’t be resolved for years." Meanwhile, it appears that the CSP still has no CEO.

A spokeswoman for the FHFA declined to provide any guidance on when a CEO or chairman might be named for the CSP. She noted: “The common securitization platform project is still in development,” adding that “We have neither final plans nor specific budgets at this time.”

The Democrat and Republican heads of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee this week finally announced an agreement on comprehensive housing finance reform legislation but the release of a detailed bill for public consumption remains forthcoming. For now, it’s impossible to tell how the agreement reached by Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-ID, is any different than the bipartisan bill introduced early last year by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA. Johnson and Crapo are expected to release draft legislative language later this week, and move to a markup “in the coming weeks.” Like Corker-Warner, the Johnson-Crapo agreement includes...