The White House still wants to kill Fannie and Freddie, but in the meantime it benefits from the their healthy revenue streams...

In the fourth quarter, 20.3 percent of refi loans sold to the GSEs were in the low-score category, the highest level for the year.

In November, Judge Sweeney denied Fannie Mae’s motion to quash or invalidate a subpoena issued by the plaintiff’s counsel…

Ginnie Mae even posted a 5.6 percent increase in refinance loan securitizations...

Colonial National Mortgage was a beta site for the IDR and Allen Maulsby, executive vice president of the bank, said the IDR process is very “legalistic…”

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae produced a combined $88.96 billion of single-family MBS in January, a modest 1.4 percent decline from December, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. Ginnie production was actually up 7.2 percent from the previous month, while both the government-sponsored enterprises posted declines in new issuance. January’s agency MBS production included...[Includes two data tables]

Jefferies Funding is underwriting a securitization of a revolving warehouse facility for agency mortgages originated by two nonbanks. The $225.0 million Station Place Securitization Trust 2016-1 received provisional Aaa ratings this week from Moody’s Investors Service. The rating service said the transaction is based on a “back-to-back” repo structure, with the three classes of notes scheduled to be paid off one year after issuance. The proceeds from the sale of the notes will be used by the issuer to purchase eligible mortgages and participation certificates from the repo seller. The revolving warehouse facility will be sponsored...

The outlook for publicly traded real estate investment trusts that invest in agency MBS and related products is starting to improve, in part, because competing investments are looking ugly. That might seem like a small consolation prize for REITs, but several are posting decent earnings, even though the book value of their common stock is relatively weak. Meanwhile, while certain investors shun their stocks, many companies have engaged...

Cash-out refinances are staging a quiet comeback as rising home-price appreciation makes such deals feasible for more homeowners. The number of cash-out refinances continued to reach new recent highs in the third quarter of 2015, rivaling numbers not seen since 2008. Black Knight Financial said close to 300,000 cash-out refinances were originated in the third quarter of last year, and about one-million over the past 12 months. During that same time period, 42 percent of all first-lien refinances had a cash-out component, the highest share since 2008. In addition, the average cash-out amount was the most it’s been since 2007 at more than $60,000. In all, these homeowners tapped...

A federal appeals court in Denver unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling that a claim of damage related to an originator/seller’s misrepresentation accrues when the loan is sold. Ruling in six cases involving plaintiffs Lehman Brothers Holdings and Aurora Commercial Corp. versus Universal American Mortgage Co. and Standard Pacific Mortgage, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected plaintiffs’ contentions that their claims were really “indemnification” claims that did not accrue until they bought the loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The overarching issue in this complicated case is...