In his semi-annual testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally put a number to his talk of “normalizing” the central bank’s balance sheet. He described a balance of $1 trillion as “a reasonable starting point, an estimate of where we might end up.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency late this week issued a final rule aimed at improving liquidity of the to-be-announced MBS as well as the new uniform MBS, which makes its debut in early June.
If you’re wondering about the strength of the MBS and ABS markets these days, consider this: More than 8,000 people attended the SFIG Vegas conference this week, a record for the event, according to officials at the Structured Finance Industry Group.
Commercial banks and savings institutions increased their investment in non-mortgage ABS during the fourth quarter of 2018, though the industry’s appetite for the product remained tepid. [Includes two data charts.]
GM Financial’s new auto lease securitization deal is weighted toward shorter-term maturities, likely to combat volatility in the auto market, such as falling prices of used cars.
Morningstar Credit Ratings plans to increase the types of assets it will consider for credit ratings. This month, it published proposed rating methodologies for MBS backed by reverse mortgages and cash flows from Property Assessed Clean Energy assessments on residential properties.
Ginnie Mae is in the early stages of developing stress tests for its MBS issuers to ensure they have enough liquidity to withstand adverse economic conditions.
Through the first two months of 2019, the nation’s mortgage-investing real estate investment trusts have rolled out plans to raise a combined $1.92 billion by selling additional shares of common to the public, according to offering documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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