Wells Fargo announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission recently completed an investigation of the company’s disclosures from mortgage-backed security offering documents and no enforcement action will be taken. Arcus Lending, a mortgage broker and a direct lender in California, recently started offering an 80/10/10 mortgage in an effort to allow borrowers to avoid private mortgage insurance. “There is a huge need for such a program and very few lenders ... [Includes two briefs]

Ginnie Mae is increasing its scrutiny of issuers and tightening the screening of new issuer applicants to ensure that all participants in its mortgage-backed securities program fulfill their obligations. The agency is concerned about issuers coming in with little understanding of how the program works and what their responsibilities are, and putting Ginnie Mae at risk, said Michael Drayne, senior vice president at Ginnie Mae’s Office of Issuer and Portfolio Management, during a recent webinar hosted by Inside Mortgage Finance. Drayne noted Ginnie Mae’s success, saying that the only way it would not be profitable is ...

Mortgage-backed securities production by the top Ginnie Mae issuers in the third quarter of 2012 slipped but not by enough to offset the 32.1 percent gain on a year-over-year basis, according to an Inside FHA Lending analysis of Ginnie Mae data. Ginnie Mae MBS issuance fell by a mere 0.1 percent from the second quarter, a hiccup that would have been easily cured had any of the top five issuers posted even a modest gain. All five issuers saw their issuances fall during the quarter. The top issuers reported a total of $100.57 billion in MBS sold to investors at the end of the third quarter, down from $100.62 billion the previous quarter. The slip disrupted an ...

Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive support for the agency mortgage market and continuing strength in the refinance program for underwater Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers, mortgage refi activity has accounted for 73.1 percent of 2012’s surging production volume. But home-purchase lending started to regain some market share during the third quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. An estimated $143 billion of home-purchase mortgages were originated during the third quarter, up 10.9 percent from the previous three-month period. By comparison, refinance production was up just 2.8 percent from the second quarter. The purchase-mortgage sector still has...[Includes three data charts]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has perhaps overreached in its efforts to develop a post-Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac secondary mortgage market infrastructure as industry groups say the agency’s proposal is “laudable” but rife with unintended consequences. In September, the FHFA in a white paper proposed a framework for both a common securitization platform and a model pooling and servicing agreement with a request for public comment. The proposed infrastructure has...

Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said this week HUD is considering additional steps to improve the financial health of the FHA single-family program, including raising FICO score requirements and supporting legislation that would take the FHA loan limits back to pre-crisis levels. The HUD secretary found himself in the hot seat before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Development, explaining the results of a recent actuarial audit that placed the FHA’s Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund capital reserve ratio below zero at negative 1.44 percent, representing a negative economic value of $16.3 billion. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, ranking minority member of the committee, raised...

Commercial banks and savings institutions continued to increase their MBS holdings during the third quarter, despite more competition for the still-shrinking asset class. A new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of bank call report data shows that banks and thrifts held a record $1.617 trillion of residential MBS as of the end of the third quarter, up 0.5 percent from the previous quarter. All of the growth came from commercial banks, as thrift MBS holdings continued to decline, dropping 1.3 percent to $175.6 billion. Banks managed to increase...[Includes two data charts]

A three-judge federal panel this week heard a rare interlocutory appeal by one of the defendants in a series of lawsuits that the Federal Housing Finance Agency has filed in connection with non-agency MBS purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lawyers for UBS Americas argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that it should reverse the May ruling by Manhattan Federal Judge Denise Cote denying the bank’s motion to dismiss the FHFA’s lawsuit as time-barred under the statute of repose. The FHFA sued...

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he plans to file more lawsuits against non-agency MBS issuers using the Martin Act, which allows platform-wide cases as opposed to cases focused on specific deals. “It’s not about one deal or five deals or 10 deals, it’s about the entire course of conduct,” he said last week after filing a platform-wide lawsuit against Credit Suisse Securities. The lawsuit was filed as part of the RMBS Working Group’s efforts, including a similar lawsuit Schneiderman filed in October against JPMorgan Chase. “The actions you have seen...

Ginnie Mae is beefing up its staff to handle increased securitization volume, a growing number of applications for new issuer approval, and closer monitoring of current participants in the Ginnie Mae program, according to a top agency executive. The agency plans to have 130 market professionals on staff by 2013, up from 70 in 2010, to ensure compliance of new and current participants with existing guidelines and the agency’s adaptation to a changing MBS market, said Michael Drayne, senior vice president at Ginnie Mae’s Office of Issuer and Portfolio Management. “We have been given...