Perhaps the new Treasury secretary finally looked at the numbers, realizing that Fannie and Freddie – wards of the government since September 2008 – forked over roughly $20 billion to Uncle Sam…
Since the fall of 2008, Treasury has controlled the senior preferred stock in Freddie and Fannie, making the U.S. government the de facto owner of the two - and the linchpin to the housing and mortgage markets.
A lot of ABS issuers that sat out the final three months of 2016 came back to the market early this year, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking. Some $53.38 billion of non-mortgage ABS were issued during the first quarter, a huge 55.9 percent jump from the previous three-month period. The market didn’t quite match the high point of last year, but issuance in the first three months of 2017 was up 23.1 percent from the same period in 2016. First-time issuers and those that didn’t issue in the fourth quarter accounted...[Includes two data tables]
S&P Global Ratings proposed changes this week to its criteria for rating non-agency MBS. The changes would provide higher ratings to certain tranches of non-agency MBS backed by new prime mortgages while prompting lower ratings for new issuance backed by seasoned mortgages. The rating service is considering a number of adjustments to foreclosure assumptions, loss severity projections and changes relating to the evaluation of qualitative factors. “The proposed revisions to our methodologies and assumptions are...