Although the stars might be aligned for legislative reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this year, new developments late this week illuminate the difficulty of the task at hand.

After a typical lull at the end of the year, issuance of non-agency MBS is coming fast and furious. A number of issuers are prepping deals backed by a variety of newly originated loans, including prime jumbo mortgages, expanded-credit mortgages and loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises.

Issuers of MBS and ABS are finding ways to finance their holdings of retained risk in the wake of risk-retention requirements that came into effect in 2016, according to attorneys at the law firm of Mayer Brown.

Freddie Mac recently introduced a new front-end credit-risk transfer option for its Agency Cred-it Insurance Structure program, the second-largest form of its CRT activity.

The plan of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee to shrink the U.S. central bank’s huge balance sheet probably will unfold with a bit of a lag because of the uncertainty surrounding principal payments and the forward-settling nature of the to-be-announced MBS market, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

After their case against the Federal Housing Finance Agency was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for Delaware in November, government-sponsored enterprise shareholders David Jacobs and Gary Hindes recently filed an appeal.

Correspondent lenders and insurers may benefit from a recent decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Eighth Circuit regarding indemnification for prior settlements.

Total non-mortgage ABS production climbed to $211.72 billion in 2017, the market’s strongest year for new issuance since 2007…

IRLCs generally last 30 to 60 days, with lenders agreeing to make a mortgage at a particular interest rate prior to funding the loan.

Distributed ledger technology known as blockchain has the potential to transform back-end functions in mortgage origination, servicing and secondary marketing, according to industry participants. Blockchain has gained some prominence as virtual currencies such as bitcoin are reliant on the technology. Tim Willis, head of the governance and controls practice at RiskSpan, an analytics firm, said reporting of servicing data to investors hasn’t changed much in the past two decades ...