Ginnie Mae’s anti-churning efforts have narrowed the spread between Ginnie and Fannie Mae mortgage-backed securities, prompting executives to say things are almost back to normal. In an interview with Inside FHA/VA Lending this week, Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Ginnie Mae, said the market and investors have responded positively to the agency’s efforts to resolve the churning and prepayment problems. “The Ginnie spread has fallen almost half a point and our securities have become more liquid,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re giving investors CPRs (constant prepayment rates) that they can model.” Bright said he cares less about the overall level of prepayment speeds. What he truly cares about is ensuring that when an investor purchases a Ginnie security, the prepay speed is correlated to changes in the interest rates and not the ...

Ginnie Mae’s credit-risk sharing concept is generating a lot of excitement among private credit enhancers, according to the company’s acting president. A planned risk-sharing pilot with FHA scheduled for later this year has the industry on its toes, said Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Ginnie Mae, during an interview this week with Inside FHA/VA Lending. “There is a line out the door of private companies willing to provide and take on credit risk and work with us on transactions where private capital would assume some of the risk,” he said. Ginnie is currently looking at ways to facilitate risk sharing between FHA and a private third party that would assume a first-loss position on a Ginnie security backed by FHA loans. Bright brought up the idea during remarks at the Structured Finance Industry Group conference in Las Vegas in February. He has been fielding calls since from ...

Agency single-family MBS represents a huge share of the asset-securitization market. So when Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae turn in a weak quarter, it drives down total issuance.

Ginnie Mae has no plans to reduce the number of issuers it oversees or raise capital standards for servicers, but in an interview with Inside MBS & ABS this week, Executive Vice President Michael Bright made it clear he’s worried about liquidity – a lot.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will begin issuing the long-awaited uniform MBS on June 3, 2019, but the Federal Housing Finance Agency strongly urges the industry to not delay getting ready.

Two of the nine MBS issuers that Ginnie Mae singled out for unusual MBS prepayment speeds reportedly have been restricted from the agency’s multi-issuer MBS pools.

As rates continued to rise early this year, the average daily trading volume in agency MBS topped $239.2 billion in February, the best showing in at least 14 months, according to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Certain types of MBS and ABS appear to have some wiggle room regarding risk-retention requirements. According to industry lawyers, many single-asset/single-borrower (SASB) commercial MBS can be structured to avoid risk retention and the rules might not apply to certain esoteric ABS.

Barclays Capital and its affiliates will pay $2.0 billion to settle claims brought by the U.S. Department of Justice related to the company’s underwriting and issuance of non-agency residential MBS before the financial crisis.

Morningstar Credit Ratings announced the withdrawal last week of unsolicited ratings the firm had placed on some non-agency commercial MBS. While regulators have encouraged the publication of unsolicited ratings, investor demand has been tepid.