Housing-finance reform appears to be in the process of a slow death for 2018 partly because of the pending departure of key players, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts.

More Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders have initiated lawsuits against the government for the Treasury sweep of the mortgage giants’ profits.

A slightly higher share of new single-family mortgages found their way into MBS pools last year, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis.

A subsidiary of Annaly Capital Management plans to issue a non-agency mortgage-backed security with a mix of seasoned mortgages. The $327.16 million OBX 2018-1 Trust will include loans that have seasoned for an average of four years and mortgages that were called from non-agency MBS issued in 2005. The newer loans have a total unpaid principal balance of $121.86 million. Some 11.4 percent of them include interest-only features. Non-qualified mortgages account for ...

Impac Mortgage Holdings will continue to focus on originating non-qualified mortgages after a change in leadership at the nonbank. Joseph Tomkinson, the longtime chairman and CEO of Impac, is scheduled to step down in July, with George Mangiaracina taking over as CEO. Mangiaracina has been an executive vice president and managing director at Impac since early 2015. Since then, Impac has boosted its non-QM production while focusing on refinances of conforming mortgages ...

JPMorgan Chase is set to issue another non-agency mortgage-backed security mixing jumbo mortgages and loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises. DBRS, Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings assigned preliminary AAA ratings to the planned $866.07 million JPMorgan Mortgage Trust 2018-3 this week. Some 1,348 loans will be included in the issuance, divided nearly evenly between jumbo mortgages and loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored ...

Fannie Mae adjusted its automated underwriting services last summer to make more loans with higher debt-to-income ratios eligible for approval without lenders needing to provide compensating factors.

Housing-finance reform appears to be in the process of a slow death for 2018 partly because of the pending departure of key players.

Former Fannie Mae executive and critic of the government-sponsored enterprises’ credit-risk transfer programs, Tim Howard, said on his blog this week that CRTs only help “sustain what has become a very profitable program for Wall Street firms and capital market investors.”

UBS agreed to a $230.0 million settlement on Wednesday with the New York attorney general to resolve issues with pre-crisis non-agency mortgage-backed securities.