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

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

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.”

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...

With Rep. Mel Watt, D-NC, expected to be officially installed as the permanent director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency as soon as next week, the change could slow the use of risk-sharing deals at the government-sponsored enterprises and progress on the common securitization platform. Of particular concern to investors in the risk-sharing deals is the role mortgage insurance companies play in the transactions. According to industry observers, current FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco would like...

The agencies securitized just $35.46 billion of refinance loans during November, down 15 percent from the previous month, and refinances accounted for 44 percent of total issuance.

Ed DeMarco might possibly name a chairman for the CSP platform and let Mel Watt have the final say on the CEO slot. Two mortgage executives interviewed for the CEO job include Peter Carroll and Luke Hayden.