A new report from FHFA confirms what small mortgage firms have long known: they can't catch much of break when it comes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guaranty fees.

Pricing on GSE risk-sharing deals have been attractive, suggesting that each may be scalable to a significant degree.

Guaranty fees are going up next year, but with a new FHFA director set to take over, loan level price adjustments may be altered.

Although there are only a few weeks left in 2013, a few large mortgage servicing deals may get done yet.

The liberal-leaning ACLU thinks troubled mortgagors are getting the shaft from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

While Ocwen Financial is laying off staffers, other firms are hiring, including Churchill Mortgage of Brentwood, TN.

With the increase, the average g-fee for new loans will be in the range of 60 basis points. But there is some good news: FHFA said it would eliminate the up-front “adverse market” fee of 25 bps assessed on all but the four states “whose foreclosure carrying costs are more than two standard deviations greater than the national average.”

Banks maintain huge reserves of roughly $21.3 billion to cover residential loan repurchase requests, Inside Mortgage Trends discovered.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a combined $82.33 billion in new single-family MBS during November, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. New MBS issuance by the three agencies was off 12.0 percent from October, continuing a steady downturn that’s been under way since April 2013. Production last month was off a whopping 58.7 percent from November 2012, when Fannie and Freddie volume spurted higher as issuers maneuvered to avoid a pending increase in MBS guaranty fees charged by the two government-sponsored enterprises. Tumbling refinance activity was...[Includes two data charts]

A Manhattan federal judge last week approved a proposed settlement by bankrupt Residential Capital with the Federal Housing Finance Agency to resolve billions of dollars in claims tied to toxic MBS sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the run-up to the financial crisis. Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York approved the agreement, which is tied to a settlement the FHFA reached with Ally Financial, ResCap’s former parent, in late October. Under the agreement, the FHFA will receive...