The Structured Finance Industry Group this week put more flesh on the bones of its proposed deal-agent role in future non-agency MBS and introduced a plan for improved communications among MBS investors. The fifth edition of SFIG’s RMBS 3.0 Green Paper adds recommendations on data standardization, enforcement mechanisms for breaches of deal terms and materiality standards. The new proposal on bondholder communications was drafted...

Risk-sharing transactions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have delivered strong returns for investors in the past year, but that could change under the monetary policies of the Trump administration, according to analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The analysts recently dialed down their recommendation on the risk-sharing transactions issued by the two government-sponsored enterprises to “underweight.” “Trump’s victory paves...

Origination of commercial mortgages could reach $515 billion this year, a slight improvement over 2015, but more lenders – life insurance companies and banks, in particular – are keeping the loans on their books, which doesn’t bode well for CMBS issuance. It’s the same conundrum facing the jumbo residential market: plenty of lending, but not so much in the way of securitization. As Inside MBS & ABS reported recently, issuance of CMBS increased...

New non-agency MBS issued in 2017 will likely include more diversified collateral and feature some structural changes, analysts at Moody’s Investors Service said in a new report this week. The rating service projected that non-agency prime jumbo volume will remain steady in 2017, while issuers will continue to explore non-traditional asset types, such as re-performing and non-performing loans, reverse mortgages, non-qualified mortgages and nonprime transactions. “Although prime jumbo deals will start to include loans with slightly lower FICOs and higher loan-to-value ratios than those loans included in 2016 transactions, collateral quality will remain...

ResCap Liquidating Trust last week filed two new lawsuits against lenders as it continued its efforts to recover losses due to bad loans purchased from correspondents that later forced the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. No other details were provided by defendant attorneys with American Mortgage Law Group, which warned that the Dec. 2 filings in Minnesota federal district court may trigger a second wave of litigation by the trust. AMLG said it has been helping a number of lenders with pre-litigation demands from the trust and has seen increased activity on that front. On Nov. 16, a federal judge dismissed...

With November’s election potentially unraveling key features of the financial regulatory structure instituted over the past eight years, experts say it’s time for policymakers to figure out what’s working and what needs to be fixed. During a panel session hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, Richard Berner, director of the Office of Financial Research, said that more information is needed about liquidity because a lack of it is often cited as one of the unintended consequences of regulation. “Market liquidity is...

Freddie Mac successfully boarded many of its MBS issuance functions on the Common Securitization Platform on Nov. 21. The government-sponsored enterprise is now using the platform for its data acceptance, issuance support and bond administration activities, according to Freddie and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie reiterated...

“That’s a lot of work for an industry that apparently doesn’t exist,” said Richard Johns, SFIG’s executive director.

In case you’re not keeping tally, there are roughly 387 calendar days remaining before the “capital buffer” at Fannie and Freddie falls to zero on Jan. 1, 2018.

Back in late August, Ginnie Mae promised the mortgage industry that it would release a new and improved “acknowledgement agreement,” a document that defines collateral rights tied to agency servicing. But now it’s December, and no such document has surfaced. “It’s in legal,” an agency spokeswoman said, apologizing for the repeated delays. Meanwhile, there is new industry chatter that the revised acknowledgement agreement may not see the light of day for ...