The half-percent annual premium reduction the FHA announced recently will likely enable the agency to reclaim the high loan-to-value segment of the mortgage market from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to analysts. Speaking with some originators that have been looking at the best way to securitize high LTV loans, Deustche Bank securities analysts said the lower FHA annual premium would put pressure on the government-sponsored enterprises to lower the cost of their guarantees. “The grapevine has anticipated for months that [g-fees] have little chance of going up and more chance of going down,” the analysts said. “But the specific risk triggered by the FHA move is that the cost of credit will now drop for high-LTV conventional borrowers.” Even before the FHA policy shift, private mortgage insurers have been pressuring the Federal Housing Finance Agency to ...
Kroll Bond Rating Agency updated the default and loss model the firm uses for non-agency mortgage-backed securities last week. Among other changes, the rating service reduced its loss expectations for purchase mortgages, reduced assumed timelines for foreclosures and formalized the penalty for mortgages with debt-to-income ratios above 45.0 percent. Titan Capital Solutions announced this week that it will purchase mortgages ... [Includes five briefs]
Standard & Poor’s surveillance of seasoned non-agency mortgage-backed securities backed by jumbo mortgages and Alt A loans played a factor in the $77 million settlement the rating service reached this week with regulators. The Securities and Exchange Commission and state attorneys general for New York and Massachusetts largely focused their settlement with S&P on ratings for commercial MBS. Just $1.0 million of the settlement concerned surveillance of non-agency MBS ...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s proposal to prohibit captive insurers from joining the Federal Home Loan Bank system included generalizations and inaccuracies, and it overstepped rulemaking boundaries, according to real estate investment trusts. The FHFA issued a proposed rule in September that would prohibit captive insurance companies from joining the FHLBank system. At least seven REITs have used captive insurers to gain access to ...
Redwood Trust, Credit Suisse and Two Harbors Investment are working on separate jumbo mortgage-backed securities that will be issued next week. The deals vary slightly by issuer, including some non-qualified mortgages in Redwood’s deal and sunset provisions on representations and warranties on Credit Suisse’s jumbo MBS. Redwood’s $338.80 million Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2015-1 is set to receive AAA rating with credit enhancement of 7.25 percent ...
Mortgages included in jumbo mortgage-backed securities in 2014 showed some shifting characteristics while maintaining strong underwriting overall, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Looser underwriting on jumbo mortgages has largely been at the fringes: some MBS have included a cluster of mortgages with combined loan-to-value ratios of 80 percent, a few borrowers with credit scores below 680 and ... [Includes one data chart]
Ginnie Mae plans to launch a performance-measuring tool, Issuer Operation Performance Profile (IOPP), to enable issuers to see how they stack up to the agency’s standards and make improvements. The agency did not specify a launch date but said the tool will be available “in early 2015.” It will be used to compare an issuer’s operations and defaults with those of its peers, along the lines of FHA’s compare ratio for lenders in Neighborhood Watch. The issuer scorecard is...
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took an action this week aimed at reducing confusion regarding the interplay between the banking regulator’s securitization safe harbor and risk-retention requirements recently set by federal regulators. Under the FDIC’s securitization safe harbor, if certain requirements are met, the FDIC, in its capacity as receiver or conservator of an insured depository institution, won’t recover or reclaim securitized assets when exercising its authority to repudiate contracts. In 2010, the FDIC added a risk-retention requirement to the safe harbor. For securitized assets to qualify for the FDIC’s safe harbor, sponsors of deals issued in 2011 and beyond must retain...
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Truth in Lending Act only compels a borrower to file a written notice within three years of consummation in order to rescind a mortgage if the lender fails to provide the required disclosure, instead of formally filing a lawsuit within that period. This could spell bad news for the non-agency RMBS space, according to an amicus brief the Structured Finance Industry Group filed with the high court in the case, Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. The first problem SFIG noted with the position that the SCOTUS eventually upheld is that it will have a chilling effect on non-agency MBS. “A determination that mere notice is sufficient to effect a rescission would reverberate through all segments of the RMBS market, creating significant hurdles for originators, issuers, ratings agencies, servicers, and trustees alike, while breeding doubt among investors regarding the value of future and already-issued private-label RMBS,” said the trade group. That’s...
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